Quote from E. J. Dionne, with a comment about the Rich Man and Lazarus parable

It seems that E. J. Dionne (in his Washington Post column today) is familiar with a few parables, such as the Good Samaritan, the Rich Man and Lazarus, and the Great Banquet (although he may not be in full agreement with parts of the Sermon on the Mount): 

I am not naive, and I am not a pacifist. But I’d ask a small favor . . . : Please stop saying how Christian you are unless you show at least a few signs of understanding the social obligations the word imposes.

As I wrote over ten years ago at the end of an article about the Rich Man and Lazarus (“‘At His Gate Lay a Poor Man’: A Dialogic Reading of Luke 16:19–31,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 32:3 (2005) 249–265):

Lazarus lived and died at the rich man's gate and was caught in the exploitative, hierarchical system of the Roman imperial world; the redistribution system from the non-elites to the elites remains in place. Yet the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, although incorporating elements of that hierarchical system, actually provides a devastating critique: Those higher standards proclaimed by Jesus serve as criteria by which all social systems should be evaluated. 

These higher standards include vertical generalized reciprocity, the redistribution from the advantaged to the disadvantaged that expects nothing in return (e.g., Luke 11; 14). They include loving your enemies, doing good to those who hate you, blessing those who curse you, and praying for those who abuse you (Luke 6:27-28). They include turning the other cheek, giving to everyone who begs from you, and being merciful just as God is merciful (Luke 6:29-30, 36). They include not only calling Jesus "Lord, Lord," but also doing what he taught (6:46). These higher standards also include reaching out to people across boundaries of class, ethnicity, gender, culture, sexual orientation, or any other boundaries that human beings erect between themselves. And, finally, they include reaching out to people like Lazarus, who are victims not only of disease, hunger, and poverty, but who also are victims of oppressive systems. The teachings of the Lukan Jesus, these higher standards, lead readers to the realization that although Lazarus ends up in the "bosom of Abraham," he was still caught in a system of oppression. The Lazarus of this parable does not utter a word, but let us give him and others like him a chance to speak. Let us hear his voice, cross those gated boundaries, and see his true plight, as well as the voices and the plights of the other people on the margins, for the Lukan Jesus proclaimed release to such captives, good news for the poor, and announced that the oppressed should go free. 

A "Day Off" from Grading to work on the Book

A "Day Off" from Grading

I got the above comic from phdcomics.com via James F McGrath's Exploring our Matrix. It reflects the "time off" I took from grading final exams, papers, projects, journals, etc. and worked on cutting the last two chapters of the book to the word counts they should be (I received much help from my editor, Bryan Dyer). Unfortunately, the time "off," unlike in the comic, required a lot of "mental effort." 

I cut Chapter 4 from 20438 words to 17523 words and Chapter 5 from 22752 words to 19870. All five chapters are now under 20,000 words, which was the main goal, although I do need to go back and add a short paragraph at the end of several of the 50+ sections to help tie some things together. Then I will finish the "glossary" of the parables for the end of the book, write the concluding chapter, and work on details such as images, etc. But first I have a lot more grading to do. The last set of papers arrives Wednesday by noon.

I also should start thanking people who read through sections of the book. I'll start with my colleagues in the Department of Religion at Oxford College/Emory: Dr. Eve Mullen, who is a specialist in Asian religious traditions, especially Buddhism, read through the section on Thich Nhat Hanh and the parables. Dr. Florian Pohl, who is a specialist in Western religious traditions, especially Islam, read through the section on the Sahih al-Bukhari and the parables. Both Eve and Florian provided helpful insights that will improve the book, and I am grateful to them.

Much of the material I cut from the manuscript involved the historical context of the people who interpreted the parables. I thought it would be good to give an example of the type of thing that was trimmed. In the context of explaining the art and thought of Thomas Hart Benton, for example, I included the following in a discussion to his approach to art and his "Regionalism":

Although a 1934 issue of Time magazine celebrated Benton and his work as an example of “new American art,” his art was attacked as provincial by many art critics and other artists. Some critics thought his works were sentimental caricatures or cartoon-like (Wolff 2012: 197). Benton himself cites criticisms of his work that called it “tabloid art” or accused it of “degrading America” (1983: 248). Yet for many people in the United States, especially in the late 1920s and 1930s, Benton “spoke their language, painted their lives, and believed wholeheartedly in the significance of their experiences.” President Harry Truman, for example, called his fellow Missourian not only “the best damned painter in America” but also “the greatest artist of this century” (Wolff 2012: 4-11, 13). The art historian Marilyn Stokstad favorably compares Benton to El Greco, saying that Benton “transplanted El Greco’s visionary style to the Ozarks” and “reformed the Mannerist style to tell the story” of the United States (1980: 34).

Such information is both interesting and important for an in-depth study, but unfortunately had to be cut for an introductory textbook such as this one on the reception history of the parables. I was able to include it, however, in a paper I gave at the Centre for Reception History of the Bible at the University of Oxford, so the research and writing was not done in vain (thank you Christine Joynes for the invitation!).

Next up, as I promised last time, is Elsa Tamez and the parables.

The Gospel in Art by the Peasants of Solentiname (Nicaragua; part 4)

The Gospel in Art by the Peasants of Solentiname

My final post about the parable interpretations by the peasants of Solentiname:

After Somoza was overthrown, some of the surviving the surviving peasants returned to Solentiname to rebuild the community and also the artists’ colony. José Arana, for example, painted his own interpretation of the Rich Man and Lazarus parable (The Rich Epicure and Poor Lazarus). 

The image of the painting will appear in the book, but since it is under copyright and no other images (that I can find) exist on the internet, I do not include it here. I thank Father Ernesto Cardenal (via Hermann Schulz) both for the digital image and for the permission to use it in my book.

In Arana's painting of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the rich man sits at his table, which is covered by a white tablecloth and abundant food and drink. There is more than enough to share, but the man sits alone. He is dressed in nice jeans, with a shirt and vest, and his hair is neatly trimmed. The room is brightly painted in purple, orange, and yellow, but the interior does not contain much furniture: his table and chair, a stand with a vase of flowers on it, and a pew-like bench with a small rug in front of it. Tellingly, a book appears on the bench, most likely the unopened Bible, which this rich man ignores in practice.

Two windows and one door are open, revealing lush surroundings and a beautiful day. Through the window on the left, a bird is visible in the distance, perhaps a reminder of how Jesus urged his listeners to “consider the birds of the air” and not worry about what they will eat and drink (Matt. 6:25-26).

Lazarus stands, not lies, just inside the door, not outside the gate. The rich man looks straight at him; he can definitely see him and observe his misery. Lazarus is dressed in cutoff jeans and a ripped t-shirt. His hair is long and unkempt; bleeding sores are visible in numerous places—they cover his face, arm, legs, and feet—and he wears rag bandages on his left arm and ankle. A dog stands before him, starting to lick his sores, thereby giving him the attention the rich man does not. By painting the two men in this fashion, the artist makes eminently clear that the rich man, who completely ignores Lazarus who stands just a few feet directly in front of him, indeed created his own chasm (between him and Lazarus, which God will replicate but reverse in an eternal way) and thus deserves his ultimate fate, as the Solentiname peasants many years before had decided in the discussions that led to the earlier commentary.

I also want to honor the ministry of my brother-in-law, Father Jerry Stookey (the brother of Rita, my wife), who worked as a priest in Nicaragua during the 1980s. During that time he and I had many fruitful discussions about how the peasants in Nicaragua interpreted the teachings of Jesus in their cultural contexts. Those interpretations, in many ways, are much closer to the first-century contexts of Jesus and his first followers than are many (even scholarly) interpretations in the United States. Those discussions with Jerry--and my study with Christopher Rowland at the University of Cambridge--opened my eyes to the depth of those often-ignored similarities.

Elsa Tamez and the parables is up next.

Happy Blog Birthday and a Blast from the Past

At St. David, Arizona
Photo by Rick Gowler

It was exactly two years ago that I started this blog about the reception history of the parables book. I will repost that entry just below these opening comments. The above photo was taken about the time I was starting the research for the book.

The very first post already recognized the primary difficulty of writing a book on the reception history of the parables. It was not the fact that I would need to research 50+ people/topics/works that ranged from the second century BCE to the twenty-first CE--that was exceedingly interesting and fun, to tell you the truth. Instead, it was and still is the need to distill those discussions to a total of approximately 100,000 words. As I write this blog post, however, I have--with the help of my editor, Bryan Dyer--almost reached that milestone. The last round of painful cuts is almost finished.

This blog post is the 246th of the blog, which means that I have posted an entry about (a little less than) every three days, assuming my math is correct. It still has not become tedious or burdensome. Even though I finished the research for the book over four months ago, I still have plenty of materials that I have encountered over the past two years to share. And the blog continued to remind me that not only did I need to distill the words down to a manageable level for the book; I also needed to make some very complex discussions understandable for a student (and lay) audience. I hope I have accomplished that goal. 

Here it is. The very first blog post on December 9, 2013:

I just signed a contract (November 2013) with Baker Academic (Baker Publishing Group) to write a textbook on the reception history of the parables. I have been working with James Ernest of Baker, and the topic is an exciting but daunting one: examining how the parables in the NT Gospels have been interpreted over the centuries.

This blog will document the process of writing that book, and it will include works that I find and insights I have gained through my research for the book.

The most difficult part of the book, as I have already discovered, is the 100,000-word limit. There are so many interpreters and so much material that should be included in such a book that it will be difficult to choose which ones should be included. Part of the reason for the creation of this blog, then, is to include interpretations that I cannot include in the book itself, simply because of space. I of course also will include in the blog insights about the interpreters that I do include in the book.

The blog, like the book, will cover not only written interpretations but visual and other interpretations. I intend not only to focus on theological or academic responses (the book will not concentrate on academic debates in modern scholarship that are adequately covered elsewhere, such as in my What Are They Saying About the Parables? with Paulist Press) but also on other types of responses including literature, the visual arts, music, social and political elements, and so forth. 

My goal is to include a number of diverse responses to the parables, to allow a wide variety of responses to be heard while attempting to balance depth and breadth, and to focus on important voices while being as comprehensive as possible. 

The manuscript is due by December 1, 2015, and I hope to update this blog regularly during the writing of the book and maybe beyond. 

The image below is a photo I took at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam on October 20, 2013. It is a close up of the father and son in his Return of the Prodigal etching. More on that print later.

The Peasants of Solentiname and the Parables (part 3)

The Gospel in Solentiname

To conclude the blog post from yesterday about the community's discussion of the Rich Man and Lazarus parable:

Elvis then argues that the parable teaches that humanity should not continue with these two classes of rich and poor; the goal should be to eliminate such economic disparities. William responds that the wealthy are ultimately responsible:

Abraham has told the rich man who is being damned that there is an “abyss” between him and the other man. There is an impassable, total separation. And it’s the rich man who has placed that abyss of separation between the two of them.

Such readings of Gospel texts proved dangerous. In October 1977, the Somoza regime destroyed the Solentiname community, and Cardenal and others joined the Sandinistas fighting against the Somoza government. In his “Letter to the People of Nicaragua,” Cardenal argues that it was the reading and discussing of these Gospel texts that convinced him to join the Sandinistas:

The Gospel is what most radicalized us politically. Every Sunday in Mass we discussed the Gospel in a dialogue with the peasants. With admirable simplicity and profound theology, they began to understand the core of the Gospel message: the announcement of the kingdom of God. That is, the establishment on this earth of a just society, without exploiters or exploited, with all goods in common, just like the society in which the first Christians lived. But above all else the Gospel taught us that the word of God is not only to be heard, but also to be put into practice (Cardenal 1982: 4:272).

The discussion of the peasants of Solentiname will continue with some of the art work the community created after their return to Solentiname.

The Peasants of Solentiname and the Parables (part 2)

The Good Samaritan

The peasants’ interpretations of the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Cardenal 1979: 3:251-256) include insights that echo recent social-scientific criticism-informed analyses of the parable (see David B. Gowler, “‘At His Gate Lay a Poor Man’: A Dialogic Reading of Luke 16:19–31,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 32:3 (2005) 249–265). One example is noted below (which could be categorized as "limited good").

A brief summary of some of the conversations:

Felipe begins the discussion by stating that the rich man symbolizes all who are rich and Lazarus denotes all who are poor. He concludes that the story is simple: Jesus condemns the rich, and the poor are saved. Cardenal notes that the rich man is never called evil; he is only called rich. Others respond to this observation bluntly:

Little Adan: “Because he was happy”

Elvis: “While the other was screwed.”

Cardenal notes that Abraham has the same response in Luke 16:25. Felipe then interprets the parable to mean that there should be no rich or poor; all should live equally both in this world and the next. Alejo agrees: the rich man should not have thrown parties every day—just every once in a while—and he should have invited Lazarus to those parties.

As the congregation interprets the parable in their in Nicaraguan contexts, their earthy and apparently simple responses are often profound expressions of their conviction that Jesus and his parables were alive, present with them, and actively working with and through them:

Gloria: The rich man’s sin was that he had no compassion. Poverty was at his door and that didn’t disturb him at his parties.

Julio: Now there are lots of Lazaruses that the rich have at their doors of their parties.

Cardenal: And the poor man is badly off because the rich man is well off, or the rich man is well off because the poor man is badly off. There are poor people because there are rich people, and there are rich people because there are poor people. And rich people’s parties are at the cost of the poor people (cf. Gowler 2005).

William takes the interpretation even further. He notes that the parable was commonly used to exploit the poor by convincing them to endure their poverty patiently in the expectation that they will receive their reward in heaven.  Felipe agrees:

Felipe: As I see it, this passage was rather to threaten the rich so they wouldn’t go on exploiting; but it seems it turned out the opposite: it served to pacify the people.

. . .

Julio: There is no point in this story being for [the rich] if they don’t read it, and if they do read it they pay no heed. The rich man of this parable cares nothing for God; and that’s the way the rich still are nowadays.

Cardenal: I believe the parable was not to console the poor but rather to threaten the rich; but, as you said, William, it has had the opposite effect, because the rich weren’t going to heed it. But Christ himself is saying that in this parable: that the rich pay no attention to the Bible.

Laureano: In the churches in the big cities you see exactly the same picture that’s painted here . . . .

Felipe: Because for [the rich] it’s like reading a bunch of nonsense . . . .

Oscar: It seems like it doesn’t do any good to be reading the Bible, then, because if you don’t want to change the social order, you might as well be reading any damned thing, you might as well be reading any stupid book.

Cardenal: It seems to me that Jesus’ principal message is that the rich aren’t going to be convinced even with the Bible, not even with a dead man coming to life (and not even with Jesus’ resurrection . . . ).

The Peasants of Solentiname and the parables

The Gospel in Solentiname

The book (at this stage) contains two modern receptions of the parables from Latin America. One reception is that of Elsa Tamez, Emeritus Professor of Biblical Studies at the Latin American Biblical University in San Jose, Costa Rica. Her first book was Bible of the Oppressed (1982).

The second reception, which I'll actually discuss first, comes in two forms from the "peasants of Solentiname": a written commentary (The Gospel in Solentiname) and works of art (The Gospel in Art by the Peasants of Solentiname).

First, a discussion of the commentary and the community that produced it:

In 1966, a Nicaraguan priest named Ernesto Cardenal and a Colombian poet named William Agudelo founded a small contemplative community on the largest island of Solentiname, an archipelago of thirty-eight islands on Lake Nicaragua. As part of his mission, Cardenal decided that instead of preaching on the Gospel readings during Sunday mass and other services, he and his congregation would have conversations about those texts. Cardenal later published a collection of these dialogues among those non-specialist voices within “grassroots” Christianity. In fact, Cardenal declares: “The commentaries of the campesinos [peasant farmers] are usually of greater profundity than that of many theologians, but of a simplicity like that of the Gospel itself. This is not surprising: The Gospel or ‘Good News’ (to the poor) was written for them, and by people like them” (Cardenal 1976: 1:vii).

The people of Solentiname formed a fishing and farming cooperative, a clinic, a center for artists, a museum of pre-Colombian art found in Solentiname, and a school of primitive painting that became internationally famous. Approximately one thousand people lived in Solentiname during this time (ca. 1970-1982). Cardenal lived in the lay monastery, Our Lady of Solentiname, which was on the largest island, and those who participated in the services mostly lived in thatched huts scattered on the shores of the larger islands of the archipelago.

The process for these dialogues follows a similar pattern. The Gospel reading is distributed to all in the congregation who could read, and the passage is read aloud so all could participate. The campesinos discuss the passage verse by verse, and Cardenal started using a tape recorder during the discussions, so that he could preserve the insights of his congregation in written commentaries (Cardenal 1976: 1:viii-x).

Although these commentaries contain common themes about God’s love and liberation, the people involved in these dialogues have distinctive and often different reactions to the Gospel text they discuss. The peasants’ interpretations of the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Cardenal 1979: 3:251-256), for example, quickly lead them into the topics of the rich and poor, salvation and damnation.

That discussion is for the next post.