Background and the Reason for the Present Study
My discomfort with the Protestant approach to the parables goes all the way back to Bible College. As we began to study the Gospels in depth I discovered that the normative Protestant interpretation of the parables didn't square with what seemed to be their obvious (to me) meaning. In my theology classes I discovered that Protestants began the interpretive process of the whole Bible with a conception of divine justice and salvation drawn primarily from a particular interpretation of Romans and Galatians. The parables were then fit into that notion of justice.
The Bible College I attended followed a theological approach called Dispensationalism. At the core of Dispensationalist theory was the idea that God worked in different ways during different periods of history (or dispensations). There was a Dispensation of Conscience, a Dispensation of Law, a Dispensation of Grace, with seven dispensations in total. Dispensationalists taught that the parables described the ethics of the Dispensation of the Kingdom but we were still living in the Dispensation of Grace. While they were instructive as to God's ultimate intentions, they didn't really apply to us today. I understood the logic of the Dispensationalist approach, but it seemed to be an artifical solution to the problem. I didn't have a better solution readily available, so I put my discomfort aside and went on with life.
In seminary I discovered that the historic peace churches (Mennonites and Brethren) took the parables at face value—something I had never experienced in any other Protestant system of thought. We were still flailing about the Protestant pool looking for a denomination to call home and I briefly considered the Brethren, largely on the merits of it’s approach to Jesus’ teaching (especially the Sermon on the Mount and the parables). But it became clear that they were more ahistorical than most of the Protestant groups, and I had already had experience with Christian groups that rejected history. I wasn’t interested in traveling that path again.
Although my understanding of the problem has changed over the years, the fundamental issues that have persisted were twofold. First, the parables were not taken at face value. What they appeared to teach was explained away when it was theologicaly inconvenient. Said another way, the picture of God in the parables seemed to be rather different than the picture of God in my many volumes of Protestant Systematic Theology. My second problem was less defined, but also a big issue ever since my run-in with the Mennonites (especially Willard Swartley and Vernard Eller, who introduced me to the thought of Christoph Blumhardt). Protestant theology generally began with Paul and worked backwards to Jesus Christ. In this view, Jesus Christ's mission was primarily spiritual; he came to die in order to save us from our sins. Along the way to Golgotha, he also taught and did miracles, but that was never his primary mission. He was no systematic theologian (the crowning glory of Protestantism), but rather an itinerant teacher with scattered ideas about the Kingdom. Paul, on the other hand, was the theologian who gathered these scattered ideas together and turned them into a system of thought. In the back of my mind this seemed backwards. Shouldn’t we begin with Jesus rather than Paul? Was the Apostle Paul the instructor of Jesus, or the other way around?
This elevation of St. Paul the theologian above Jesus the teacher did not occur in a void; there was another reason that this inversion occurred. In Protestantism scripture is viewed as a level playing field. All scripture is inspired equally by God; all scripture can be used equally by the Holy Spirit to teach the church. The Protestant battle cry of “Scripture Alone!” is generally (and rightly) understood to mean that authority for the church (in the Protestant view) comes only from scripture and not from any other human source, whether it be the writings of the disciples of the Apostles, the canons and creeds of church councils, or the pronouncements of the curia, (the teaching office of the Roman Catholic Church). But there is a flip side to the doctrine of “Scripture Alone!” Not only is scripture the only source of doctrine, in this view, all parts of scripture are equally a source of doctrine. We can as readily draw doctrine from 2 Kings as we can from the Gospel of John. Song of Solomon is every bit as efficacious as Philippians. Since the teacher is the Holy Spirit and the text is the whole Bible (except for the last portion of the Bible that was used in Palestine in Jesus’ day—now called the Apocrypha—quietly removed by the Protestants), Jesus’ teachings were no more important than the teachings of the Apostles or the story Jephthah’s vow (Judges 11).
In seminary I discovered that the Jews of Jesus’ day did not view their own scripture in this flat manner. The heart of Jewish scripture was the Law and from that flowed the Prophets and the Writings. Those three portions of scripture were not precisely equal; the Law always had priority over the other two sections. In light of that, I realized that Jesus never referred to his Bible (and our Old Testament) as “The Bible.” He usually referred to it as “The Law and the Prophets.” This seemed to me to be a tacit approval of this traditional elevation of the Law over the Prophets and Writings. In seminary worship class I also learned that the early church viewed scripture in the same way, like a grain of wheat. Just as the wheat has the germ at its heart, which is surrounded by the endosperm and finally the bran, so (in Jewish scripture) the Law is wrapped about by the Prophets and the Writings and similarly the heart of the New Testament is the Gospel which is surrounded and supported by the Epistles and two other books (Acts and Revelation or the Apocalypse) that are hard to categorize.
Mr. Freeman, way back in Bible College, made us stand up when any portion of the Word was read. This was a logical outworking of the “level playing field” view of the Bible. When I arrived in an Antiochian Orthodox Church in suburban Chicago, the people sat for the Epistle and Old Testament readings and stood up for the Gospel. Later on I discovered that the Russian Orthodox never sat down during worship, unless they were kneeling or prostrating themselves, but this tradition of sitting for the Epistle and standing for the Gospel was typical of Antiochian Orthodox churches.
For over a year I have prayed and worshiped in an Orthodox Church. Every week at Orthros we greet Jesus Christ with a holy kiss by processing forward and kissing the Gospel following its reading. There are two processions at every Divine Liturgy. Both symbolize the entrance of the Lord Jesus Christ into his kingdom. At the Little Entrance it is the Gospel (and not the whole Bible nor complete the New Testament) that is honored. At the Great Entrance it is the gifts of bread and wine that are honored. These actions are the logical outworking of the view of scripture held by pretty much everyone other than the Protestants: that the Gospels stand at the very heart of divine revelation, just as the Law stands at the heart of divine revelation for the Jews.
Over the last year this new practice of giving the Gospels the greater honor has caused the old issue of the relationship between the Apostle Paul and Jesus the Teacher to begin to percolate once again. What would happen if Jesus’ parables were taken at face value instead of being interpreted through a systematic theology which began with Romans 5, 12, and Galatians 3? What if my starting point was the loving God who honored the divine image within humans by asking that they take responsibility for working out their salvation with fear and trembling rather than beginning with predestination, the absoluteness of Pauline grace, and a view of the atonement where every tiny detail was absolutely controlled by God because humans simply couldn’t be trusted? What if I allowed Jesus the Teacher to be the final arbiter of truth rather than making his teachings submit to those of the Apostle Paul?
This is the impetus for these studies of the parables. In other words, I am reprocessing interpretive and theological trouble spots from my former Protestant view into my current Orthodox view. As a result, this current work has a distinctly polemical character. It is not only a study of the parables, it is a critique of the Protestant hermeneutic (or, interpretive system) that I have operated within for over three decades. A person who is simply looking for a commentary on the parables will not likely find this present study satisfying. A person who is interested in some of the Biblical foundations that have led Protestantism in a different theological direction than Orthodoxy will, hopefully, appreciate the admittedly polemical study that follows.
Copyright © 2006 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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