Shuck and jive indeed

If you read the blog roll down the left side you may have noticed that a new blog has shown up in the list. It's called Exploring Our Matrix and it is the blog of James McGrath who is a biblical scholar at Butler University. I respect McGrath or he wouldn't be in the roll but I should admit that I also pity the man.

Back in the mid sixties, Tom Wolfe did a cartoon of an Episcopalian Priest playing the banjo at a "hootenanny" in order to get in with the young people. McGrath is the current day version of that. In a desperate attempt to make biblical studies relevant he teaches about the theology of Battlestar Galatica or of Lost. His blog title is a reference to the cheesy, warmed over Platonism of the recent movie about taking the blue pill.

That, folks, is what approximately $15 k a year buys you in the way of advanced education.

But I pity poor McGrath. I really do. What else are the purveyors of contemporary liberal theology going to do? They bet everything on a grand generalization about economics and morality but life, tragically, has let them down. They are like the people who still persisted in believing in lumineferous aether. Little by little, their undertsanding of the Bible has been undermined to the point that there is nothing left for them to stand on. Keen to believe that the future still belongs to them, the keep modifying their claims to try and make the old arguments work.

The hermeneutics of making sh*t up
Case in point is a sermon about the parable from Matthew 20: 1-16 by one John Shuck that McGratrh praises. You'll want to sit down to read this one because otherwise it will make you dizzy. According to Shuck, the real point of the parable is to make us critical of the landowner. We are supposed to see him as a person who is ostentatiously demonstrating his power over others.

Yes, I know, the obvious problem is that the opening line is

For the kingdom of heaven is like a a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.

It says the kingdom "is like" and Shuck's conclusion forces us to read it as really meaning that the kingdom "is not like". The very first commenter calls him on that and Shuck writes a response in the comments at his blog. The thing is that he never answers the objection. He says we might read it otherwise and never gives us any reason why we ought to other than that is where he wants to end up. He is assuming the thing he wants to prove in order to prove it.

In any case, Shuck gives away his own game when he writes elsewhere in his post:

I suggest that parables in general including this one are not allegories. They are open-ended invitations to view the world differently than previously we have viewed it.

Well, it's wonderful that he suggests but a suggestion is not an argument. More problematic than that is the phrase an "open ended invitation to view the world differently". Perhaps Shuck hasn't thought this through but 'open-ended" means open-ended; it means we can go on quite literally forever suggesting meanings. If such a thing is possible, then language has no meaning. The very possibility of shared language rests on the fact that somewhere explaining comes to an end.

A truly open-ended invitation to see the world differently would include the option of viewing babies as food or as soccer balls.

Again, the opening line of the parable says that this is an allegory. If Shuck doesn't want to read it as an allegory he needs arguments for that and they have to be better arguments than, "Well it could mean something completely opposite". Yes, and the sentence "Everyone has a right to free speech" might also be read to indicate that there is no such right.

I'm not joking with that example. Read with a sneer the same way you might say, "I believe you and I believe in the tooth fairy too!" Any sentence can, and it is sometimes the case that they do, mean something other than the literal meaning. But the expression "the literal meaning" means something because most of the time the meaning is the literal meaning. If we are not to take the literal meaning there have to be very good reasons for doing so and  Shuck provides none.

Anti-market theology
The real problem for Shuck, as becomes obvious when you read further is the free market. He wants to use Jesus as a club to beat up on trade. Here is what Shuck tells us is the real context of the parable:

In early first century Palestine, as Herod built his mini-empire he had to fund his projects. You don’t fund massive projects by dealing with individual people and their puny little vines. You bring in agribusiness. You find whatever means you need to drive those inefficient people off their land and give it to large landowners who can then turn a profit.

There was agribusiness in first century Palestine? Think of how little respect you have to have for the actual meanings of words to toss of an assertion like this. Land did tend to end up in the hands of a just a few people in the ancient world but not because they had modern agribusiness or anything that even vaguely resembled it. The problem goes the other way, it is modern market-driven economics that makes it possible for more people to own land than ever have before. If first century Palestine had had agribusiness the people would have been much wealthier than they were.

And that is where this sort of theology crashes into economic reality. It also crashes into biblical reality.

The problem might be put this way: Nowhere does Jesus say either that "the Kingdom of heaven is like unto a brothel" or that "the kingdom of heaven is like unto a glorious cooperative where everyone gives according to their abilities and receives according to their needs". Jesus always seems to pick examples that are morally neutral. A vineyard owner could be a good guy or he could be a bad guy. There is nothing built into the story to make owning a vineyard good or bad.

Preachers like Shuck aren't happy with this. He grew up on an economic ideology that says: Owners bad, workers good. (John Pilch, whom I admire a lot, is also subject to this bias in his interpretation of the parable of the talents.) He can't accept a neutral owner. He gets quite heated up at the suggestion that an allegorical reading would have us see the owner as a stand in for God [emphasis in the original]:

Whenever Jesus tells a story about landowners, judges, kings, and those with authority and power, we should be very skeptical that that character is a stand-in for God.

If we see this landowner as God, we will have to engage in a great many gymnastics to make sense of it.

That is a absolutely true as far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn't go very far. Nothing about the parable tells us that we should see the owner as a God-like being. He is presented as a Vineyard owner and nothing else.

Think of the most obvious comparison in the Bible: God as father. Does it follow from this that every father  is an example of what God is like? The father in the parable of the prodigal son, for example, do we use him to see what God is like? Or do we read that parable and this one as telling us something about the sort of relationship God will have with us. To be able to say the Sun is to the earth as  basketball is to a marble it doesn't have to be the case that a basketball is as grand as the sun.

If someone says, life is like the game of golf, it is not reasonable to say but golf is just a game and life is real. "Is like" does not mean in this case that you can draw exact parallels at every point. If that were the case there would be no point in using allegory.

And while all parables are indeed parabolic rather than straightforward, isn't it Shuck who is engaging in a great many gymnastics here?

It is fascinating to compare the way business people get treated in the gospels as compared to the way religious leaders do. As I've said before, I've heard many people preach about Matthew 23 but I have yet to hear someone stand up at a pulpit and say, "You know, the intended target of this condemnation is people like me." Because it is a blunt and unmistakable condemnation of preachers. If Jesus condemns any group as a class it is religious and political leaders. And yet liberal preachers keep telling us that the real point is to condemn business leaders.

BTW
One aspect of this parable that does not get much attention is the absence of faith in the story. The typical Protestant interpretation, as Shuck notes, is that this is about grace and how grace is not based on works. But if it is about that, why the complete absence of faith in the story?

To the contrary, this is very much a parable about works and it is that, I suspect, that is at the very bottom of Shuck's problems understanding it. The message is not that all believers will be saved but that all workers will be paid.