Teaching or commanding?

Nicholas Lash has a great piece in the same C21 issue I just quoted Michael Himes from, in which he discusses the distinction between understanding instruction as “education” versus understanding it as “command.” This is a crucial distinction, which is far too often ignored in our every day usage. I love how he describes the church here:

... the Church exists to be, for all its members, a lifelong school of holiness and wisdom, a lifelong school of friendship (a better rendering of caritas than "charity" would be). It follows that the most fundamental truth about the structure of Christian teaching cannot lie in distinctions between teachers and pupils ... but in the recognition that all Christians are called to lifelong learning in the Spirit, and all of us are called to embody, communicate and protect what we have learned.

He further quotes Timothy Radcliffe, O.P., as noting that:

Human community is sustained by conversation... Sharing our faith is always more than stating our convictions: it is finding our place in that conversation which has continued ever since Jesus began to talk with anyone whom he met in Galilee, and which is the life of the Church.