Seek Wisdom
Seek Wisdom
A Good Life, Part 3. God is a Farmer. An Interview with Dr Fred Putnam on the implications of Biblical metaphor for our life, work, and leadership.
In this final segment of my interview with Dr. Fred Putnam regarding my illustrated children's book, A Good Life, we discuss the Biblical metaphor of God as a farmer and it's implications for our lives, our work, our businesses, and our leadership approach. Dr. Putnam has written several books on Classical Hebrew and is Professor of Bible and Liberal Studies at Eastern University's Templeton Honors College.
The metaphors that we use to understand the way things are, whether it's business or education or anything else, those metaphors are therefore going to have a trickle effect that comes way out here to behavior, to even to little tiny decisions that we think don't matter. In this final segment of my conversation with Dr Fred Putnam, we discuss his understanding of the biblical metaphor. God is a farmer. We'll also discuss why that idea has significant practical implications for how we live our lives. On this episode of seek wisdom[inaudible]
Speaker 3:the Bible is full of metaphors that give us different perspectives on who god is and how he relates to us. If asked, which metaphors are most prominent, I suspect most people would point to ideas such as God as a king or a judge or even a father. While the Bible does contain all these ideas, Dr Fred Putnam believes the idea that God is a farmer is even more prominent and should therefore shape our understanding of who god is and how we should relate to him. Dr Fred Putnam is professor of Bible and liberal studies at Eastern universities. Templeton Honors College and has published several works on classical Hebrew, the original language of the majority of Christian scripture. He was one of my professors in graduate school and the one to whom I dedicated my recent children's book entitled a Good Life. This episode completes our discussion surrounding that book and explores the idea that metaphors can shape our thinking, words and actions in our daily lives. We'll also see how metaphor can even shape the way we think about business and leadership. I hope you'll find this final discussion helpful and practical in your own search for wisdom.
Speaker 1:[inaudible]
Speaker 4:we're back and wanted to jump back into the idea of a, as a farmer. The first talk that I heard you give and what you said earlier was a metaphor that you considered a predominant one, maybe the predominant one in the Bible. What are some implications of that? Actually, maybe, let me preface that with another question that I'm curious about. I know that you, you've come from a farming community. I think that yes, I grew up on a farm. Being a farming town, worked for farmers all my life till I went to college. I went. Right. Is there any connection there you think between you seeing that Yadda is a farmer metaphor as predominant one and your own background? I'd say actually the kind of the opposite. Okay. I was very
Speaker 2:much aware, uh, at the time that, uh, my background probably did influence me toward that, uh, because a lot of those images are just so familiar that I mean, I, I got a paper from a student who, who wrote a pastor wrote about a passage, that passage in which Jesus says, I'm the vine, you're the branches and talks about the father pruning the branches. And, and the student completely, completely misread the passage as this was a course on metaphor and he was writing a paper to expound the metaphor and completely missed it. And I said, you know, I think you really need to go back in and either visit a vineyard and talk to someone or do a lot of reading because what you said is the opposite of what is actually being said. And, uh, so we did, he went back and he rewrote it and was great. What he did ended up with was quite, it was quite striking. But if I hadn't grown up on a farm, we had a vineyard. I mean, we had a great fine, I should say vineyard. And my mom made grape juice and you know, we, so I, I knew what it meant to prune a grapevine and he didn't. So, but, but when I started seeing this in scripture, in the Bible, I began thinking, ah, this, um, first I thought I'm imagining it. And then I just started seeing it more and more and realize that it undergirds even a statement like this. So in one of the prophets, God says through his Prophet, I planted the nations, I planted his end. He uses the same verb that you'd use for planting a great fine or anything else. And a lot of times I find those metaphors are obscured in translation because they are metaphors. And so the translators feel on not sure that readers are going to understand the metaphor. So I'll explain it. And so the metaphor kind of disappears. You actually have to look at the Hebrew words and the Greek words that are being used in order to discover all the places. But there are hundreds, literally hundreds of passages that use this metaphor far more than, for example, the sayings that you have. A is a king, which a lot of people would think of Ori. God is a judge. Very popular. Yeah. You would think that would be in most people's minds, that's probably the biggest one automatically. Or even God as a father. And I, I think what's what's happened is we were so far removed for the most part in our culture, and I think you asked a question about this, uh, at that paper after when I finished reading that paper, what if I have no experience of farming? How do I, how am I supposed to understand these metaphors? And that really is the right question. And I'm very thankful that my background lets me understand. At least some of them I know I wasn't born in, you know, a thousand BC Israel, but it at least has, I think sensitizes me to those in a way that I might not have recognized them if I didn't come from that background. You've said the implications of Javese as a farmer are huge to you. Talk about some of those. Well, one passage for example that, uh, familiar to a lot of readers of the Bible is Psalm one. And in verse three it says, um, that, uh, I'm translating the Hebrew says he shall be like a tree transplanted by ditches of water. And it's not usually translated that way, usually just says planted by streams of water. But it's a pretty clearly a word that means the transplant something. And, and that reminded me when I, when I realized that, which took me years to actually look up the word and study it and figure out that that's what was going on of the pathogen. A Isaiah five, where it says, um, I will sing a song of my beloved, my beloved planted a vineyard and it says he dug his rocks and built a wall and built a watchtower and went and got advised and planted it that you don't transplant something that's not valuable. You don't transplant something from which you don't expect something, fruit or flowers or whatever it may be, and you don't transplant something into a place that's not the right kind of place for it. Instead, you prepare the place to make sure that what you want to grow there is going to be able to flourish. In this case, the farmer God obviously had dug ditches so that it would be irrigated so that we'll have enough water. He'd prepared the soil. As it says in Isaiah five, he cleared it of stones. He built a wall around it to protect it from, um, from predators and from the foxes that would steal the grapes. Uh, as we read in Song of songs and that I've found very comforting and many people I've preached on this in churches. And, uh, one of the most precious things I ever got was a, a little note from a, I think she was eight years old, and she and her family had just moved to the town. This is their first or second Sunday in this church. And a afterward, her mother sent me the, the note that they were homeschooled. So this was their, her assignment to write a little essay, I guess you'd call it. And she said, forget what she called me, Doctor Putnam or something, uh, said that God is a farmer and we're plants and that God plants us where he wants us to be. So our job is to flourish wherever we're put. Wow. Yeah. The summary. Quite a summary. That's exactly right. She got it. She did it. And it just struck me that so many of us live discontented lives. Uh, we're always looking for something different. I mean, we, we get catalogs in the mail that we know are filled with things we don't need. And yet we go through them anyway. You know, we go to the shopping mall, not because we need anything but just to go shop. People have extramarital affairs, people destroy companies or organization. I mean all because we're, we have this restlessness that makes us discontented and thinking that we know the thing that's going to finally fill this gap in our lives and instead this image says no trust that you're in the right place. Now that's not saying that there's not such a thing as injustice that we have to rail against or work against them. He's not denying that. That's because the thing with the metaphor is that it conceals and reveals at the same time. And if we get stuck on the metaphor, like we're talking about with the, with the brain metaphor as a computer, if we get stuck on that, there are many things going on that we're going to lose sight of or never see in the first place. Because the metaphor controls the way that we see is it becomes a lens as it were. And the Lens only focuses at a certain distance, which means it's missing what's behind it and what's, yeah, that's right. What's not in its focal, uh, yeah. If you're a photographer, you know, we have a depth of field, right? Right. So what's, yeah, too far away or too close isn't going to be in focus. So even to say UVA is a farmer. That's not the only image. But the point is, if you're put here, if you're here, this is, this is where you are supposed to be right now. Now what you may be called to do, maybe to struggle against as, as the abolitionists did quite rightly, to fight for women's rights, to fight for the rights of the disabled or minority, you know, those are, those are right. And good things. So it doesn't, it doesn't say just sit back and whatever, you know, case, I mean, except at all. And yeah, right, right. We're not passive, but we are content and we live a life that basically functions on the basis of trust rather than have anxiety or maybe arrogance thinking that I know better in the same way. It doesn't just use that metaphor about individuals. It uses it about nations too. And I read a lot of war history, World War One, World War II, especially the first half of this of the past century. And realize how late in human existence, the idea of nationalism is the relatively late invention, if you will, or, or discovery. And so, you know, we read statements like this. In fact, I just heard a sermon fairly recently that that made it sound like, oh, that's what God did back then. He planted the nations, but now he's only interested in individuals. And I say, well, why God doesn't change. And if he was interested in nations and establish them and actually uses this language in Jeremiah to use it as a prophet, he says, I've appointed you to plant and to establish and to uproot and tear out nations. But he's still doing that. And so we, we tend to look as human beings, we tend to say, well, your primary loyalty is to your country. And this would say no, maybe not because you don't really know. You're not the one who established your and you're not the one who is maintaining it or not the one who's going to uproot it. No, your primary allegiance goes beyond way beyond your country. And again, it's a question of where our meaning in life comes from. Where are our satisfactions in life come from? Uh, if I can, if I can truly believe that, that I, and we are in the place appointed for us, in theory, we wouldn't have empires. There'd be no need to go out and conquer other peoples. And uh, I realize that's idealistic. I understand. Sure. But it also arises out of a deep misunderstanding of what it even means to identify ourselves as a people or as a nation. Right. That's very good. So I've used this image before and maybe I use it in class, I don't remember that a metaphor is like a, we're looking at, we're trying to look into a room, a furnished room, but we can only look through windows. We can't get inside. And the windows are different sizes. They're different shades of cleanness, right? Um, and some of them we can't get very close to cause there's maybe there's poison ivy on the ground, others we can get right up to and put our eye right up against the glass. Uh, but we can never see the whole room. And the clearer the view that anyone window gives us, the more inclined we're going to be to say this is the right view and everything else just supplements it or is ancillary to it. Right. And I'd rather say no. Every, every window gives us a valid PR perspective on the room. But none of them gives us the whole perspective. In fact, even if we took the top off the room and look straight down, we still wouldn't see it because if there's a table, we can't see the floor. And that's why you're getting the satellite view that that's not, that's right. And so we can't choose a window and say, this is the right, this is the true window. The others are metaphors. And some people in fact have said to me about some biblical metaphors. Yeah. You don't want to, you're not trying to start a new denomination of a United farmer. That's right. That's right. That's right. Yes. And I just said, um, and maybe the way to think about the other way to think about this is, and this, this is what blows my mind, is that if God is infinite, then that suggests that there is an infinite number of possible metaphors. Sure. But it also implies that because we're finite, most of those metaphors are meaningless to us. And so therefore we will never know what they are. Right. Even even in eternity, we'll never know because God is infinite and eternity isn't right. We still, we're going to enter it at a point we will never understand fully. We'll only ever understand in part and imperfectly. And so what becomes more important than is to say, Hey Jeremiah, come look in this window and I'll go look in your window and you know, whoever else is around the rock. Come on, let's all train window. See what I'm seeing. Yeah. Let's even put all this together and let's talk to each other about what we see. Yeah. And maybe at some point we get really brave and clear away the poison ivy can get a little closer to that window. So we've got a little better view or somebody manages to wash a window, whatever it is, right. Or, or you know, in the, in the history of, of any academic
Speaker 4:discipline and all of a sudden somebody is born who's just fascinated with this particular window and they just, yeah, they're the ones that clear way to poison ivy that, you know, everybody has sort of thought that's not an important window. All of a sudden someone comes along who for whatever reasons in Amor what that window and then they clean it and they bring everybody to it and all of a sudden there's a new way to look at
Speaker 2:[inaudible]. Some people might say that's what happened in the reformation. Sure. But then other people would say yes, but the problem is then the people who came to that window became so enamored of it that they rejected all the other windows. Right. And Yeah. Which is a human tendency, right? Yes. We get excited about something and make it dominant. It feels safer
Speaker 4:when we're in territory that we've explored in her comfortable with. Yes. Right. It feels safer for Sun, I guess. Some people feel safe on adventures and some people would rather stay home and I think that's a, we see that happened to Bilbo Baggins and he gets the whole transformation there. You became someone who wanted to stay home and ended up with somebody who has someone who kinda liked adventures and in some ways a was no longer satisfied just to be at home. So yeah. Anything else then on those? On the, on the biblical metaphors? Uh, I mean I think we've, I think we've laid some good groundwork to use the metaphor of the idea that there are many, we should look for them. Uh, we should see them as, as windows of looking in or maybe lenses for seeing things from different perspectives. One of my sons has been looking at images from the Hubble telescope and call me in there and say, dad, look at this. So he's looking at the crab Nebula the other day and he was enamored with that one. And I looked at the caption and either, cause it was a really beautiful image and it said that it was a composite image of like four, I think, different telescopes that have taken it and then put them all together. And I thought, wow, what a, what a wonderful metaphor for how we should use metaphors or these various lenses or these different perspectives that we bring. Because the composite in which was so much more grand and Glorious and colorful and beautiful then any of them by themselves. Yes. So I thought that was a, a good example of maybe how all this should work. They should be things, we should be making new composite images all the time because sometimes had, even Paul, I noticed when Paul was talking about Israel, he starts by using this, uh, well he starts using the, the marriage metaphor and he's trying to explain to people, okay, well, if God has been this faithful spouse and he's called Israeli be this faithful spouse, then what do we make of new gentile development? You know, is this, is God being unfaithful to his people now? Right? And he says, no, here's what's happening. And then he sets that marriage metaphor aside and he starts talking about all of trees. I don't know whether he says all, but he stopped talking about trees, all of you I'm with. Okay. And so that, no, he says a new, a new branch has been grafted in. And so it would have been really weird for him to say, well, no, you know, this, this arm has been cut off the spouse and we've transplanted knew that wasn't gonna work. Um, so he had to shift to the tree. He's still talking about the same entities involved, but he has to pick up a new metaphor cause there are new concepts that need to be explained that this first metaphor doesn't,
Speaker 2:that's an excellent example of how when we become really a namerd of any one metaphor, well, like the brain thing, we don't recognize that we're blinding ourselves to other aspects of reality. Right? And so maybe, maybe the warning is, um, the more helpful we find a particular metaphor, the more cautious we need to be about our commitment to it and more willing to say, is there another way to think about this? Or what am I not seeing? What am I actually pushing aside as it were in order to maintain this metaphor as my central focus?
Speaker 4:Otherwise, we could take that same tendency of, of tribalism or nationalism and bring that into our ideas. Yes. Um, where we, we try to set up one and plant a flag and, and gain power through that. And that that same tendency can express itself in a host of ways, even in, even in something as uh, like metaphors and which one is predominant. The Bible. Let's shift to something very practical. We've been talking, well not that these things aren't practical implications of the more practical, but if we were going to talk about the idea of metaphorical thinking and how it could bring transformation, a better life using metaphorical thinking, what are some, some practical ways you could do that? You, you already talked about, uh, early on, uh, when we come to conversation with, with somebody being wary of how we're viewing the conversation, making sure that maybe we're not, the unit is about it when they're viewing it as a, an opportunity to go on an adventure together. Are there other ways that we can use metaphorical thinking to improve either our lives or our relationships, our work? Um, speak to that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question. In our cultures. Sports is such a dominant analogy that I wonder if it might not be helpful for us at times to think of things like our job as being part of a team where we really, I mean, I know corporations use that language all the time. They don't really mean it, right? Right. But they use it both. But what if they did mean it? What effect would that have if everyone knew that we have a, we have a, an obvious goal, a definable goal. I mean to score more points than the other person. I mean like all things, metaphors, businesses again, right? Yeah. Businesses again. Right, right, right. If one of us wins, we all win. There is no winners and losers on a team. If the team loses, everybody loses. That changes my way of viewing the people who perhaps are above me, who are making decisions that I don't understand. I have to think their goal is the same as mine. My goal is not just to earn a living. My goal is to be a good member of this team and these people are paying me, they're supporting me and my family. They don't have to hire me. They could find somebody else. I signed on knowing that this was the coach. Right? That's right. That's right. And so I have to trust that when the coach comes to me and says, you know, we really need you to do this and not that I have to be willing to say, okay, coach, I trust you. I'll go do this. Even if I'd rather do that. And even if I think I'm better at doing the first thing, if you're really better, start your own team and become the coach. Right. That's right. Yeah. I guess that's what entrepreneurship is for. Does it? Right, right. Yeah. There you go. Entrepreneurship. That's another nice, nice metaphor for entrepreneurship. Yeah. So it could transform the way we think about what we do with the bulk of our work week. And I don't look then at the person in the office next to mine as a competitor, but rather as a team member, a fellow team member, and uh, I never played football. But, uh, I know enough to know that if your alignment on the, on the football team, you've got to know what the lines been next to you is doing. Cause otherwise you could knock each other out. Right? You've got to be able to work in concert. Timing has to be some elegance to it. Yeah. Even or not intelligence. Yeah, there is. And so if we could stop and that's part of the problem, but that's a different story, right? And there we go. Life is a journey, right? We can't stop. But if we could stop and just think about how do I view my relationship with my spouse or my better half with my children, with, with my family as a whole with my church or with some other civic organization or with my job or with my neighbors and think about what forms the way that I respond to and interact with all of these people, we might begin to discover that, you know, for some reason I always feel like feel tense with my neighbor because I, I view that relationship somehow for some reason as adversarial. What causes that? What is it? Something in me? Is it something in my neighbor? Is it, what's going on here? And this sounds a lot like self-help talk. Um, which can be good or bad. Okay. I'm not really advocating any, anything in particular apart from trying to be deliberate and thoughtful about understanding what it is that's shaping the way I view the people around me and my relationship with them, their relationship with me. If that's not being, finding metaphors. Hopeful. I'm the, I'm not sure what would be.
Speaker 4:Are there other metaphors for business or for companies that might be more fruitful? Do use a metaphor that might be more helpful?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. I wonder if some of that comes down to a corporation of any size asking itself, what is our real purpose? Why do we exist? The real problem is their ethical questions, not business questions. Right? Ethical decisions that have to drive the business decisions and the ethical decisions are going to come out of how we view reality because our view of reality, which is going to be for the most part, our metaphor is for how things work and how things ought to work to us is the truth. And we always act in accord with what we think is true. And so our idea of what's good comes out of our understanding of what's true, which comes out of how we view reality. And so we're going to, the metaphors that we use to understand the way things are, whether it's, whether, again, whether it's business or education or anything else, or even a family, those metaphors are therefore going to have a trickle effect that comes way out here to behavior, to even the little tiny decisions that that we think don't matter, but that eventually add up and are going to affect not just us but people around us. Or if you're a corporation, businesses, even whole towns, villages, cities,
Speaker 4:you know as you're, as you're saying that, I wonder whether the metaphor of people or plants would be helpful for, for business leaders to think about because their own employees for one thing, am I providing an environment that allows my people to flourish? Are they being fed, watered, nourished, a given light that allows them them to thrive as they work to serve the company and be a beautiful part of the garden? And then the people that we are producing products for services for their plants as well. Are they being nurtured by what we do? Are they being harmed by what we do? And then of course, that gets into the whole ecological question, which becomes do we leave a metaphor and go into physical reality of how is this hurting the actual plants that we deal with? So it's interesting that that, well, in back to your overarching, uh, biblical metaphor of God as a farmer in the world is his field and we're plants in it. Maybe that's even a good one for business. Yes. That would bridge the ecological voices. Um, it's his word. It's his field. Right, right, right. And so that whole idea of stewardship becomes another predominant metaphor of this isn't yours. This has been given to you to be a good steward of. And so are you being a good steward of the garden you've been given that idea of stewardship underlies a biblical model even of what leadership, which is that essentially the leader's responsibility is the wellbeing of the people under him in light of the job that he or she has been called to do. Right. And this gets us back to the importance of metaphorical thinking. If we find a good metaphor to work with, it can permeate everything we do in positive ways and it can permeate everything we do in negative ways. So, and the book I put the life is a game, a metaphor, the character that I put in there as a a bit CD, CD looking yes, there's a potentially empty bottle of whiskey or something that are close by. And I did that because I, I wanted there to be one potentially negative, uh, metaphor in there. Even as for kids, I want this to provoke conversations with, with parents that are meaningful for the kids. And there's plenty of negative metaphors out there. So I didn't in any way mean that, uh, you know, I, I know that a lot of people have their kids in sports and they consider those a good life lessons that they learn. I don't deny that at all. I was more thinking of the, a game that someone enters only with the, uh, purpose of, of defeating another or taking their money or whatever that may be. And this was, this guy was painted in that way. I don't say any of that in there, but it's implied in the way Lowe's. That was funny because I had a, um, a mom whose was reading the book to her kids and I think the little boy was swelled. He's maybe three and a half, four. And he pointed to this guy and that picture and he said, mommy, he's bad. Wow. And she likes that, you know, he got it. And um, so I, I think that's maybe a, a good place to, uh, to draw all this together. That these, these metaphors that we choose to govern our lives can have positive effects on our relationships, on our work, on our employees, and on our sense of purpose on any given day. And they can also take us in a completely wrong direction. So being conscious of the metaphor that we're operating under would be, I would guess one of the things that I think you and I would would strongly agree on that we want people to walk away from this, this conversation from the book, frankly. Yeah. But believing that whether you know it or not, you're most likely operating under an unconscious or conscious metaphor if it is unconscious. Think about it. And um, and maybe change that metaphor to one that can improve your relationships, improve your sense of purpose, and improve the, the journey of your whole, whole life ahead. Any final comments on that? I think that's possible to do too, because the immediate response would be if it's unconscious homeless, supposed to figure it out. And we do that by looking at ourselves as asking what kind of decisions do I make and how do I make them? And even things like as, as nitty nitty-gritty is, how do I respond when somebody criticizes me? Hmm. Do I take it as an attack or do I do, I've used them as an enemy or as an or as a doctor trying to heal me. Yeah. That brings to mind the proverb wounds of a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies. Yes. Um, and the, and the pervasive idea throughout scripture that God disciplines those he loves. And so if we can look at criticism as, okay, I, there's probably some truth here. I can view this as somebody doing me a favor[inaudible] possibly. And if I don't, then there's something in me that is being defensive and that if I'm defensive, then that means I'm operating in a mode of conflict. I've got, I've got this life as a war mentality, which may be necessary at times. I think of lifelong struggle against slavery for some people. And it was a war that that was a wow. We always[inaudible] Weber Wilberforce was fighting a war. Yes, yes, she was. Yes. And, but, but that doesn't mean he was at war with other people in his life. Now just means on that issue, on that issues. Yeah. Yeah. So different metaphors apply in different situations and trying to understand that. And, and, and, and I think we both would agree that it's hard work. Oh yes. Because we don't even know that we have these, that we're already in these ways. It takes a lot of work and it may take talking to other people. I think we should definitely encourage that. That's willing to listen to that because I think we'll find more metaphors there than we realize that, um, ourselves, because again, you know, you coming from a farming community, um, and, and even being able to draw on that in your study of, uh, you know, they as a farmer, um, that's helpful. And you can give insights to people who haven't grown up in a farming community. Um, but other people have grown up in war zones and they're, they're good things that they have learned about surviving that that's right, that they can share with, with us who've grown up in, you know, very peaceful, uh, situations most of us. So, um, yeah, the conversation again, life has a conversation. It is the more that we talk to each other about these things, uh, the more enriched we can become as we share these metaphors, become conscious of the ones that we're using and even find new ways of metaphorical thinking that can cause us to, pardon the metaphor, flourish. Uh, so thank you. Um, and any final words? Uh, thank you, Jeremiah. Yeah, this has really been great. It's been a delight. Um, it's a, I guess been about, Oh wait, 12 years maybe since, uh, since we first met that, which brings to mind the local metaphor. Life is a vapor[inaudible] it goes so quickly, but thank you for the conversations that you had with me and the fellow students when I was, it almost seems wrong to say under your teaching, but I would say around round table. Yes. Around the table. That's right. Because those are cherished memories of mine. They shaped me in very meaningful ways and really have brought me to this interview today and to these things which have enriched my own life. And so thank you. Well, it's been my pleasure. Yeah, thanks Jeremiah.
Speaker 1:And that brings to a close our third episode of Seek Wisdom and my discussion with Dr. Fred Putnam surrounding my illustrated children’s book, A Good Life. I wrote the book in hopes of fostering meaningful communication between parents and children using 10 different metaphors for life. The book is available from online sources like Amazon.com or through your local bookstore. Thank you for listening. I’m Jeremiah Pent.