Call no man father.In which category would you place it?
Good question, Elsie, and thanks for asking. It's Semitic hyperbole, and it's a striking feature of Jesus' rhetorical style.
Examples of this would be, for instance, where Jesus said that you must hate your father and mother, your brothers and sisters, your wife and children, and your own life, or you are not worthy of Him.
We know this is hyperbole because subsequently everybody's told to love one another, and nobody is ever praised for being a "real good hater" and despising all their loved ones.
Another example is where Jesus says that if your hand or foot or any part of you causes you to sin, you should cut it off and throw it away.
We know this is hyperbole because nobody is subsequently told to maim themselves, this never forms part of church legislation, eventually even judicial maiming is forbidden in Christian law and culture (unlike in Islamic law --- shari’a --- where the maiming of offenders is not forbidden, but commended and even required to this day.)
By contrast, Christian philosophy doesn’t praise anybody for being a "real good maimer." In fact I think it was Tertullian who took this "cut it off" thing literally and castrated himself. For this and other reasons he was regarded by the Church as having fallen into heresy.
Same goes for "Call no man teacher" and "Call no man master," also part of the very same Scripture which we’re discussing. Nobody, not even you, observes this as a literal binding prohibition. What we're being warned against, is putting anybody up as a rival to the Messiah's authority.
Interestingly, in the 23 books of the NT which follow after the 4 Gospels, nobody is apparently at all constrained from calling someone "father," "master" or "teacher." It happens dozens of times. There was no problem. Paul, Stephen, John and other NT leaders called people fathers and masters and teachers, and were called so themselves. Again I say, no problem.
I have a good deal of contact with the Protestant/Evangelical community since I have worked for decades with these brothers and sisters – good people from many Biblically-literate and faithful Christian denominations --- in the pro-life movement. I have never run into anybody who found it morally objectionable to call someone “father” “master,” or “teacher.”
I have found this objection only on the FR Religion Form, and even here only from a very few of the more active polemicists. This leads me to conclude that this point serves mainly as a kind of forum entertainment.
Tagline, my dear Elsie.