Healthy Discipline

I'm still working on unpacking this passage about discipline in Hebrews 12. I decided to go look up the word in Greek and compare it to the Greek word for disciple. I have been told all my life that the two words were so similar, at least in English, that they carry much of the same meaning. But that has always been an observation that I have never personally checked out for myself. So I decided that it is time to go see for myself what the similarities and differences are in these two words.

At first I began to wonder if they were very related at all as I looked at their definitions. The Greek words themselves looked very different. But then I saw what was going on. The word translated “disciple” simply means to be a learner or a pupil, a student. That is pretty straightforward. But when I looked at the word for discipline there were a lot more options. When there are a lot of options there is also a lot of room for a translator's own preferences and prejudices to leak through in how they interpret a word or passage. But it can also leave room to see how an alternative meaning can sometimes better reveal the truth about God that has been hidden by someone else's bias.

Some of the potential meanings for the original word translated “discipline” do involve punishment, but I found interesting nuances when I looked through the root words that make up the Greek word. The primary meaning seems to have to do with training and educating someone. The references to the painful part of it denote that the violence of the smiting, when it must be done, is conservative and less than other potential violence. But primarily it seems that this word has more to do with training and educating a person more than creating pain for them.

What I see when comparing these two words is the two sides of the same concept. The disciple is the one who is the recipient of the training and education, and the discipline comes from the one who is doing the training and educating. It does not seem to be implicit that there has to be any smiting or punishment going on in this process, but if it is necessary it will always be very measured, restrained and deliberate for only assisting in the training and education process, not for punitive reasons. I believe that it would be safe to say, especially given the character of the Teacher in this case, that any pain that has to be inflicted to accomplish the education needed in our lives will only be to the extent necessary to bring good growth and healthy advancement. There would be no abuse of power or coercion or punitiveness to this process. Only that which would be for the benefit and maturing of the recipient would be allowed.

While that is not something I would clamor for, it is a vast improvement over the abusive punishments that many human fathers inflict on their children. Much of that is done as a means of venting the anger or frustrations of the parents on the children or trying to force their desires on their children instead of carefully trying to help them learn skills of self-control and healthy thinking and real maturity.

In reality, if we want to know what good discipline looks like, we would find the best example in the way Jesus related to His personal disciples. That was the perfect model of a match between disciple/student and discipliner/teacher. If we carefully analyze and learn from the ways Jesus treated His followers in all sorts of varied circumstances and especially in times when they were making mistakes, we will begin to get an idea of what healthy discipline looks like.

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