Sallie McFague: Collected Readings

2. Parables as Metaphors

2 Parables as Metaphors This selection from chapter 4 of Speaking in Parables fleshes out some of the ideas introduced in the previous chapter regarding parables, and gives a sense of McFague’s developing biblical hermeneutic. Whereas earlier she delved into the parable of the Prodigal Son, in this chapter she focuses more on the parable of the Wedding Feast (Matt. 22:1-10). It is here also that she introduces us to her early christological concept of Jesus as “the parable of God”—that is, “the distinctive way the transcendent touches the worldly—only in, through, and under ordinary life” (3). This christological turn evidences her demurral from her early theological influence, Karl Barth, and initiates her later, more expansive theological concern for immanental transcendence. Source: 1976:72–80 Parables have not always, or usually, been viewed as metaphors. Historical criticism tended to focus on “what a parable meant” in its historical context (C. H. Dodd and Joachim Jeremias). This approach is perhaps an advance over Jülicher, whose “one-point” interpretation tended to reduce the parables to their ideational possibilities, evidencing little if any appreciation for them as metaphors, in other words, as nonreducible entities. A metaphor is neither reducible to one point nor is its “meaning” foreclosed in some historical moment: it is rather generative of new meanings in the plural. C. H. Dodd’s definition of Jesus’ parables does point to other possibilities. At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.1 The emphasis on strangeness, doubt, and teasing into active thought preclude the reduction of the parabolic form to one point or to a purely historical 17 interpretation. Amos Wilder indicates the same direction when he conceives of the parable as a metaphor in which “we have an image with a certain shock to the imagination which directly conveys vision of what is signified.”2 But before we can speak directly of the “certain shock to the imagination” which the parable form effects, we must look at its setting—not its historical setting (a question for the New Testament scholars to debate) but its setting as an aesthetic object. As an extended metaphor, the parable is an aesthetic object—and we shall have more to say about this—but, it seems to me, an aesthetic object of a special sort. For to a greater degree than other aesthetic objects, such as an Eliot poem or a Tolstoy novel, the setting of the parable is triangular. The components of the triangle are source or author (Jesus as narrator), the aesthetic object (the parable narrated), and the effect (the listeners to whom the parable is narrated). This triangle pattern points to the original situation of the parables: Jesus told stories to people. All three factors should operate in any analysis of the parables, for they cannot be abstracted from their source or from their listeners. As Norman Perrin points out, there are three kinds of interpretation involved in any textual criticism: historical, literary, and hermeneutical; that is, criticism of who tells or writes, what is told or written, and to whom the text is directed.3 The parables present a special case, however, for the point of Jesus’ parables is not mere illumination, aesthetic insight, or secret wisdom. There is a stress in the parables on confrontation and decision, an emphasis not evident in most other aesthetic objects. “The parables of Jesus were directed to a specific situation, the situation of men and women confronted by the imminence of the interruption of God into their world.”4 Hence, while the three components of the interpretative triangle are crucial, there is an emphasis on the third, on the listeners, though, as we shall see, the power of the confrontation occurs only because of who told the parables and what is being told to them. The first component of the triangle, Jesus as narrator, is perhaps the most difficult. We are all well aware of the pitfalls of the Intentional Fallacy, the deleterious effects on the integrity of the aesthetic object through interpretation by means of the “intentions” of the artist. And we have no desire to fall into that trap, not because it is unfashionable but because if we take the parable as metaphor seriously, attention must be focused on the parable itself and not...