Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Jesus told many parables, stories designed to teach a lesson. What are the best practices for interpretation of parables? Can a parable have more than one point? Let’s think about this in the next few minutes Here on Grace in Focus. Thank you friend for joining us today. This is the ministry of the Grace Evangelical Society and our website is faithalone.org. There you can subscribe for free to our magazine. It is a bi-monthly publication published six times per year. Great magazine with Free Grace perspective articles. And yes, you can receive it for free. Only you have to pay for postage if you live outside of the 48 contiguous United States. Find it on our website and get subscribed today. That’s at faithalone.org.

And now with our discussion of the day here are Ken Yates and Kathryn Wright. 

KEN: The question deals with parables. And specifically, is there only one point to a parable? And I remember very vividly being in seminary class and being told that. That in a parable, there’s only one point. And that keeps us from allegorizing or coming up with whatever we want the different points in the parable to mean. 

For example, in the parable, the prodigal son. What is a fatted calf mean? Or in the Good Samaritan, people will say, well, when he binds the wounds up with oil, that that’s talking about the Lord’s Supper. And you hear these interpretations. 

I still remember one of my seminary professors saying, this was his words, you can’t make a parable walk on all fours. You know, you don’t find everything doesn’t mean something in the parable. It’s just one, one theme. 

KATHRYN: And I think it’s interesting, because I know where you’re going with this. But I do want to say that we are living in a time where a lot of people come to the scriptures and see it all as allegory. For example, you’ll hear Genesis is just a poem. We were just talking about this in an earlier podcast, or that Jonah is not a real story. That’s just a—Jonah didn’t really exist. That’s just an allegory. And so it is pretty common. 

KEN: And so people who say that, they have to come up with, well, and Jonah, you know, if it’s an allegory, what does the boat mean? What does the sailors mean? You know, what does the seaweed mean? 

KATHRYN: Right. And things just can become very abstract, very quickly, with that line of thinking. And so obviously that’s a problem. And we would agree that if you come to the Scriptures and everything, I remember one time I was teaching in Zambia and I had a student come up. And he was asking about when Joseph is interpreting the dreams of the bread maker and the wine taster. He asked if the three baskets of the bread in the dream of the bread maker is a depiction of the Trinity, because Jesus is the bread of life, and it’s some sort of depiction of the Godhead. 

KEN: And my guess is, that he had heard that from somebody I’m sure, 

KATHRYN: Yes, exactly. 

KEN: He wasn’t sitting there thinking about it. 

KATHRYN: No. People get handed down this kind of very allegory mindset when it comes to interpreting scriptures. And you do have to be careful about that. 

KEN: And Amy’s particular question was the question about the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son. Was he a believer? Now a lot of people would look at that and say, that’s not the point. 

KATHRYN: Yeah. You’re getting too into the details. 

KEN: And there’s a classic example. Right. So is it legitimate to say when you study the parable of the prodigal son to ask, what is the older son teach us? Or do we just simply say, if the people who are right, the parables only have one point, what would that point be? A lot of people would say the parable of the prodigal son. And this is as unbiblical as it can be, is if you want to be saved, you’ve got to repent. And that’s that’s the point. So you shouldn’t, you know, the prodigal son repents and his father accepts him. Boom. That’s it. Don’t worry about it. 

KATHRYN: So then to ask, well, he’s a son at the beginning of the parable. How does that fit into the imagery of this being an unbeliever coming to faith and being born again? He’s already a son. 

KEN: And that’s a great point. Grace people understand that, no, this guy was already a son. When he’s in the mud with the pigs, he says, in my father’s house. And so, but you’re right. 

KATHRYN: People will say, well, you’re being too specific. You’re, you’re looking at the details too closely. That will be their response. 

KEN: Right. And then when you come to the end of the parable, when he comes home and the, and the older son, the brother is upset, it’s illegitimate and their view to say, well, who is this guy? You know, what is he doing? Again, you only get down to the one point. 

Now, Kathryn just said a few minutes ago, yeah, we got to be careful. We can’t allegorize everything. 

KATHRYN: I think these are rules of hermeneutics, right? How do we study the scriptures? And base one of the simple things is to say, when will you’re talking about a book that’s dealing with historical narratives, that’s different than a parable? A parable is by its nature a story, right? That Jesus is speaking in these parables to paint a picture of something. So, and that’s different than Genesis, for example, which is Moses is telling us what happened. These are the historical events. 

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KEN: And so the case of a parable, let’s just stick with the parable of the prodigal son. Once we see that, okay, no, this is talking to believers. And by the way, Luke is written to believers. Well, you know, this is at Luke 15, the parable, the prodigal son. Luke is writing to believers. So someone who comes along and says, well, this is just a parable telling us how a person becomes a believer. That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t make sense in the context of the book. And it doesn’t make sense even in what Jesus is saying about there was a son. And it’s not someone who’s not a son. He’s a son who strays. 

And so the point of the parable is, what about a believer who strays? Who’s out of fellowship with the Father? And that changes everything then. You know, do we say, okay, well, then the point of the parable would be, well, if you’re out of fellowship with the Father and you’re living in the far country, then you need to repent to have that fellowship restored. Right. And that’s more in line with what Jesus is saying. 

But then it’s entirely legitimate then to say, okay, what about the other brother? I’ve been talking about sons are believers. And the young son has wandered away and has fallen into sin. And he’s out of fellowship with the Father. And this is what he does to come back. Then it’s legitimate to say, well, there’s another son in the parable. What does he teach us? 

KATHRYN: I think too that this idea of there’s only one point, and that’s all you can say about a parable, is an odd take in that you’re basically saying that the Lord just frivolously gave these details just for funsies? 

KEN: Yeah. For example, in that case, if his whole point was just like, okay, when you repent, you come back, that’s what the parable should have ended. So what is the whole point at the end where the older son is out in the field? And he comes back and he hears the dancing and he goes, what’s going on here? And the servant says, well, your brother has been restored and he’s alive now. And then the older son gets angry and the Father comes out to meet him. That’s a lot of material that the Lord has—

KATHRYN: just thrown out for no reason. I, whenever I’ve heard this argument too, I always think of the parable of the four soils, which is also in Luke, Luke chapter 8. And while this is not the case for all the parables in that example, the Lord gives us His interpretive methodology and how we should handle parables. He gives the parable of the four soils and then the disciples come to him and ask, what does it mean? And the Lord interprets it for them. And He gets into those details. 

KEN: Yeah, with the four soils, there’s four different things that He goes into and the reasons why. 

KATHRYN: What is the seed? What are the birds? 

KEN: Who is the one who sows the seed? 

KATHRYN: Who is the one who sows the seed? What does the sun represent? What does the thorns represent? It’s very detailed in every part of it He defines and explains. I mean, yes, there is a general primary point. The response to the Word of God, but that there are different ways in which people will respond to the Word, the seed that’s being cast in that parable. And so he gives all of these nuances to the different ways that people will respond to the Word of God. 

KEN: And we can look at people within the scriptures and say, well, there’s someone in the thorny soil, there’s someone in the hard soil, there’s someone in the good soil. Yeah, this idea that there’s only one point is to me, very, very strange. I bring it up because Amy brings it up, but also I remember being in seminary and saying, okay, yeah, that’ll keep a fence around any allegory. I don’t want to come up with these weird things that this means. But we can look at it in the context and say, okay, what’s happening? What is the Lord teaching? What’s His point? And you can see where the different parts of the parable are forwarding or explaining what He’s teaching. 

KATHRYN: Scriptures are rich. And I guess it’s interesting to me that one of the arguments that we as Free-Gracers talk about is that the Bible doesn’t have just one message. And yet I think as a general rule, that’s a pretty common way of looking at the Scriptures, that the whole Bible is about how to get people saved. 

KEN: And which is so wrong, right? 

KATHRYN: And so just big picture for a minute, that mindset is how people view the entire Bible. The entire Bible is just about one thing, how to get people into heaven. As Free-Gracers would say, no, yes, we have the book of John, which is evangelistic, but the bulk of the Bible is not about how to get people saved, how they receive eternal life. It has a lot of richness to it. And yet that is a foreign thought to most people. And so if that’s how they view the whole Bible, then it shouldn’t surprise us that they come to individual passages.

KEN: That’s all it’s teaching. 

KATHRYN: That’s all it is. It’s just one point. 

KEN: Jesus gives a long sermon, but that’s all it is. 

KATHRYN: That’s all it is. All four gospels are about how to get people saved. 

KEN: On the older brother, just in closing here, if Jesus is teaching what the believer out of fellowship needs to do and how the Lord accepts him back, isn’t it pretty clear in that context what the older brother represents? A legalistic believer who says, no, I don’t want him back. And that’s what happens in the parable. So it just fits with what the Lord is teaching. That’s not an allegory. Well, Amy, we hope this helped you. Don’t fall for it. Then in these parables, there’s only one thing. And once you find it, that’s it. 

And for all of our listeners, remember, keep grace in focus. 

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On our next episode: The responsibilities of those in spiritual leadership. Please join us and until then, let’s keep grace in focus.