How Do Parables Work?
How Do Parables Work?
(avg. read time: 3–7 mins.)
Given the presentation last time citing how analogy is characteristic of parables, one might think that the answer to the question of how parables work is straightforward. They work by analogy. But alas, it is not that simple. For the question then arises: How exactly are these things analogous? This is a little less complicated for non-narrative parables such as similitudes or riddles where the analogy is made more directly. But the matter has been significantly more complicated for narrative parables.
Since the days of Adolf Jülicher in the late nineteenth century, it has been common in scholarship to separate parable and allegory, or at least Jesus’s narrative parables and allegory. The parables had accrued a wild history of interpretation in which so many elements were taken in so many different ways depending on what the allegorical interpreter wanted to correlate the parable to. Jülicher himself had shown this in his history of interpretation on the parables, and he insisted that every parable had one and only one point, which is the point of comparison bridging the reality represented and the figure that represents it. Accompanying this claim was another that initiated a new chaos in parables studies, which was his assertion that parables are self-interpreting, and so the interpretations attached to parables are the additions of the early Church, not part of the original teachings of Jesus.
Unfortunately for Jülicher, these claims lead in opposite directions. For if there is one and only one point, something in the context of the story would need to make this clear, whether in the explanation or in the context making the explanation obvious (such as the Pharisees knowing the parable was about them in Matt 21:45 // Mark 12:12 // Luke 20:19). But the claim that these interpretations are later additions and that the story is self-interpreting has led to less interpretive control, as some scholars have argued that metaphors—which they consider parables to be rather than allegory1—are actually much more open to interpretation than previous generations thought, once you dispense with those interpretations that would, presumably, otherwise cause parables to be dispensed with once the interpretation is provided.
Indeed, based on what some interpreters will tell you, one wonders what parables cannot do. William Beardslee wrote an article in which he developed what other scholars had already claimed about the social “world-shattering” and “world-building” qualities of parables.2 One of the chief purveyors of such engulfing views of parables as non-allegorical metaphors is John Dominic Crossan, who once summarized his view as, “against Jülicher, the parables are not timeless moral truths beyond all and above all historical situations; but, as against Jeremias, neither are they to be located in Jesus’ own historical experience as visual aids to defend a proclamation delivered before them and without them. Jesus’ parables are radically constitutive of his own distinctive historicity and all else is located in them. Parable is the house of God.”3 It is no wonder, then, that Crossan would be so taken with the category of parable that he would propose, without argument against or consideration of counters, in his book The Power of Parable that the canonical Gospels are “megaparables.”4 As Crossan’s own rather varied record of approaches to and interpretations of parables has shown, the distinction between parable and allegory has not led to any better defined or more controlled interpretation, but has left it unmoored.5
However, more and more scholars have come to decry such a distinction between parable and allegory.6 One important study in this area done by Madeleine Boucher noted that allegory is not so much a genre unto itself as a device of meaning which gives a story two levels of meaning (the literal and the tropical).7 Stories with allegorical elements need not have each element pointing to something outside of itself. In speaking of “allegories” as such, scholars often appeal to extreme examples like The Pilgrim’s Progress, but not to, say, Lord of the Flies. Craig Blomberg, who advocates an approach to parables as having such allegorical elements, argues that it is most often the “characters” of a parable that have outside correspondences, not necessarily all of the elements.8 Whether this is always the case or not, it functions well as a working hypothesis to help people get a grasp on the narrative parables to start with.
Blomberg also notes that, “Contemporary analysis largely agrees that there are at least three primary functions of allegory: (a) to illustrate a viewpoint in an artistic and educational way, (b) to keep its message from being immediately clear to all its hearers or readers without further reflection and (c) to win over its audience to accept a particular set of beliefs or act in a certain way.”9 These functions fit with what scholars have increasingly acknowledged about the rhetorical functions of narrative and non-narrative parables as indirect acts of communication. It also fits with how the Gospels show the functions of parables to reveal and to conceal, “There are thus two ways in which allegory can conceal even as it tends to reveal. In the first case, people may simply fail to grasp the meaning of one or more of an allegory’s constituent metaphors; in the second, while recognizing the meaning of an allegory, they may reject its appeal to bring about some kind of transformation in their lives.”10 In this setting, it makes sense that explicit interpretations would be offered to those who sought for them, and as fits with many OT, rabbinic, and Greco-Roman analogues (particularly among fables).11
One other point that Boucher makes in this regard deserves to be quoted in full:
In the continual quest to find the difference between allegory and parable, the assertion has recently been made that in the case of an allegory the tropical meaning (or lesson) can be stated in expository prose and the literal meaning (or story) discarded without loss, whereas this cannot be done in the case of a parable. This assertion simply cannot be demonstrated to be true. As has been said, all that the interpretation of any tropical narrative work does is to leave aside for the moment the literal meaning (or story) and to state the tropical meaning (or lesson) in expository prose…. A parable, being filled with imagery and action, and suggesting as it does that there is more meaning to be discovered here, has great power to catch and hold the attention of the hearer, and to be remembered long after it is heard. That is why it is able to teach its lesson more effectively than straightforward moral or theological discourse of the kind given in an interpretation. The interpretation, standing alone, does not arouse curiosity or strike the imagination as does the story. But the loss is in rhetorical effect, not in meaning (except insofar as the literal level of meaning is for the time being ignored). There is no difference whatsoever in this respect between a parable and any other rhetorical composition having two levels of meaning.12
Likewise, as Klyne Snodgrass reminds us,
If meaning is the value assigned to a set of relations, parables provide new sets of relations that enable us (or force us) to see in a fresh manner. Parables function as a lens that allows us to see the truth and to correct distorted visions. They allow us to see what we would not otherwise see, and they presume we should look at and see a specific reality. They are not Rorschach tests; they are stories with an intent, analogies through which one is enabled to see truth.13
In short, parables illuminate and reveal by means of analogical correspondence. This is more straightforward in parables that function as similitudes or riddles. In terms of narrative parables, the analogy may be extended by means of allegory, but it is by no means an unrestricted allegory. By virtue of being indirect in communication, they have a way of concealing, which, in addition to the natural interest humans have in stories, can work to attract the audience’s interest and attention. But in the explanation that may (and often does) accompany the parable, the analogous correspondences in combination with the connections to common experience provide revelation and insight on a subject.
This is an odd distinction to make, since allegory is precisely an extended metaphor. See Madeleine Boucher, The Mysterious Parable: A Literary Study, CBQMS 6 (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1977), 20.
Willam A. Beardslee, “Parable Interpretation and the World Disclosed by the Parable,” PRSt 3 (1976): 122–39.
John Dominic Crossan, In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1973), 32–33.
John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).
Against the views of those like Crossan who attempt to make metaphors more and more all-encompassing and indeterminate, see William F. Brosend II, “The Limits of Metaphor,” PRSt 21 (1994): 23–41.
Craig L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2012), 40–81 provides a helpful survey of scholarship cutting against this separation in one way or another.
Boucher, Mysterious Parable, 20–21.
Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables, 64–65, 190–91.
Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables, 62.
Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables, 63. Cf. Boucher, Mysterious Parable, 24.
Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables, 78; Stein, “Genre of the Parables,” 32–33. Also see R. Steven Notley and Ze’ev Safrai, eds., Parables of the Sages: Jewish Wisdom from Jesus to Rav Ashi (Jerusalem: Carta, 2011).
Boucher, Mysterious Parable, 30 (emphasis original).
Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 8 (emphases original).