Pete Enns - The Evolution of Adam, Parts 1, 2, 3

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2011/11/talking-to-pastors-about-adam-and-evolution-options/

by Peter Enns
November 8, 2011

This post is by Pete Enns, and it is taken from his blog at Patheos and re-posted here.

Last week I spoke to a gathering of pastors from the NY Metro presbytery of the Presbyterian Church of America on the problem of evolution and Adam. This topic is a particularly pressing problem for this denomination, since the Westminster Confession of Faith (their doctrinal standard written around 1650) presumes, understandably, that Adam was the first human, created specially by God without any preceding evolutionary process.

I thought I’d summarize what I said to these pastors. My aim was not to force upon anyone views they are not prepared to ingest, but simply to present the options, my own position, and why I arrived at it.

So, my first point was to lay out the options for thinking about Adam in view of evolution.

Evolution can either be accepted (in some form) or wholly rejected. If rejected, one has no problem with an historical Adam as first man, but then one has to find ways to neutralize the scientific data, which is attempted in various (but unconvincing) ways. (Google Al Mohler, Ken Ham, and Hugh Ross.)

No need to get into that here. This group of pastors was already (largely) aware that evolution cannot be dismissed, and so we proceded to other things.

If one accepts evolution, the first thing to note is that one has left the biblical worldview. I think this is an obvious point, but needs to be stated clearly. As soon as evolution is accepted, the invariably result is some clear movement away from what the Bible says about Adam.

Hence, if one wishes to bring Adam and evolution into conversation, one is left with the theological burden and responsibility of bringing them together somehow in a manner does justice to both. The second part of my talk was focused on how that conversation can proceed with integrity (see below).

Back to the flow chart.

So, once one accepts evolution, the question becomes “what do I do about Adam?” I see two choices: Adam is either historical (in some sense) or he is not.

If one wishes to retain a historical Adam, the two options I am aware of (if you know of others, please let us know) are:

(1) “Adam” was a hominid chosen by God somewhere along the line to be the “first man”;

(2) “Adam” was a group of hominids (a view that accounts best for the genomic data that the current human population stems from a few thousand ancestors, definitely not two ancestors).

In my opinion, these two options fail for the same two reasons:

(1) They are ad hoc, meaning that are invented for the sole purpose of finding some way to align the Bible and science. It is generally a good idea to avoid ad hoc explanations, and we rarely tolerate them when others make use of them.

(2) The “Adam” that results from these ad hoc maneuvers is not the Adam that the biblical authors were talking about (a chosen first pair or group of hominids). No biblical teaching is really protected by inventing “Adam” in this way.

This brings us to a non-historical Adam–meaning Adam in the Bible as parabolic, metaphorical, symbolic, or “supra-historical” (a term I learned from Richard Clifford, meaning a truth transcends history but told in historical terms, and therefore not meant to be taken literally).

I gave three options for a non-historical Adam (there are more). The red line joining them indicates that these options are not so much distinct as they are variations on the larger category “non-historical.”

One option is to understand Adam as a literary figure, which would relieve the pressure of thinking of Adam as the first human.

A [second option is a] mythical understanding [of Adam] – which is the most common, I think, among scholars of the Bible and the ancient world–means that the story of Adam is a concrete expression of a deeper reality. (Some would argue that story is really the best form to communicate “deep reality,” but we’ll leave that to the side.)

A third option, which I throw in because I happen to think it has a lot of merit, is to see the story of Adam as a story of Israel and not as the story of the first human. I will explain that more in my next post.

Anyway, those are the options as I see it. Which option(s) is(are) best depends on one thing: accounting well for the relavant exegetical and historical factors.

That is the subject of the next post, but let me preview it here briefly. Any attempt to account for Adam in an evolutionary scheme will have to account for “data.” Scientists work this way, too. “Models” that account for most of the data well (not forced, ad hoc, or idiosyncratic) are models that need to be considered.

Bringing Adam and evolution into serious conversation is really a matter of building convincing models.

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Talking to Pastors about Adam and Evolution: Models (1)

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2011/11/talking-to-pastors-about-adam-and-evolution-models-1/

by Peter Enns

posted on November 4, 2011

In my last post, we looked at some options for how to bring Adam and evolution into conversation. Today, we begin to look at the factors that have to be addressed when building a “model.”

A model is a way of “putting the pieces” together that accounts for as many pieces of the puzzle in as compelling a way as possible. So, when discussing Adam today, a pretty big “piece” is evolution. Talking about Adam in a way that ignores this “piece” will not be compelling.

The same holds for ancient Near Eastern literature. Any talk of Adam that does not account for the similarities and differences between Israel’s origins stories and those of Israel’s neighbors won’t be compelling.

We don’t have all the pieces, however. Think of it as 1000 piece puzzle where only, say, 300, are in the box. Skilled puzzle solvers dump the pieces and begin separating out the edge pieces, and they find that most of the boarder can be put together.

Then they group together similar pieces–those that look like grass and trees, others of sky and clouds, etc. Many of those pieces fit together nicely and are placed inside the frame where the puzzlers’ skill and experience tell them they should go: grass and trees down here, sky and clouds up there.

What the puzzle as a whole looks like is a matter of working with the pieces you have, putting them where they most reasonably belong, and filling in the empty spaces based on your general knowledge of what puzzles look like, and that more sky is likely to be up there, more grass and trees down there, an animal of some sort over here (because one piece has a tell-tale paw on one edge).

OK. I’m killing this analogy. You get the idea.

That is what biblical scholars do. We put pieces together and fill in the gaps as best as we can. Any attempt to solve the puzzle that leaves pieces in the box or puts sky where grass should be will not be compelling.

A good model of Adam will account for the pieces and make a case for where those pieces belong and how they hang together. So, what are the pieces of the puzzle that have to be accounted for? That is what the next slide begins to address.

Adam is mentioned in Genesis and in Paul’s letters (Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15). For each of these authors–living in different times and places–we need to be mindful of three factors.

(1) Near literary context. One must account for the words the text before us, i.e., how it behaves, what it is “saying” on its own terms. This is often refered to as “grammatical-historical” interpretation. So, what do Genesis and Paul actually say about Adam?

(2) Canonical context. What Genesis says about Adam must be placed in the larger context of what the Old Testament says as a whole, and what Paul says about Adam must be placed in the larger context of what the New Testament says about Adam. [This is known as "contextualization" - res]

(3) Cultural context. Neither Genesis nor Paul’s letters written in a vacuum, but in cultures where origins was widely discussed. What these biblical authors say about Adam must be placed against the backdrop of the cultural moment(s) in which they were doing their writing. [Thus, what is their "cultural context?" - res]

One caution is that these factors are not mutually exclusive–they interact with each other, which is sort of the point for why we have to look at all three (hence, the connecting blue lines).

Only after we do the work of thinking through Genesis and Paul in terms of these three interweaving contexts can we bring Genesis and Paul into a meaningful biblical theological conversation and begin answering the question: “What is Adam doing in the Bible?”

Then–and only then–can one turn to the issue of how evolution and Adam can be in conversation.

In my opinion, many of the problems with the Adam/evolution discussion stem from short-circuiting this process. For example, taking the near literary context of Genesis, comparing it to evolution, and saying, “Well, that doesn’t fit.”

Looking at Genesis and Paul in their larger canonical and cultural contexts helps us understand what the biblical authors were saying and why–which helps us understand what we might have the right to expect from the story of Adam.

But that is no quick fix; it is a process that takes some patience. Welcome to the world of biblical interpretation.

OK, I spent too much time talking about puzzle pieces and such. In my next post, I’ll outline some of the details a bit more (unless I think of another analogy and get wordy again).

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Talking to Pastors about Adam and Evolution: Models (2)

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2011/11/talking-to-pastors-about-adam-and-evolution-models-2/

by Peter Enns

posted on November 6, 2011

Today I want to list (not discuss) some of the factors that have to be accounted for in building a compelling “model” of Adam in the Bible. If you want more details, you can either invite me to your house for a VERY expensive evening or you can wait for my book to come out.

The slide below reproduces the slide in my last post but in chart form. The three contexts we looked at are down the left column with some (by no means all) of the specific factors in the next two columns.

Remember, that for the pastor’s seminar where I gave this talk, my focus was not to judge between these issues (although I certainly expressed my opinions), but to lay out the types of things that I feel need to be considered.

Near Literary context of Genesis.

• A perennial issue is the presence of other human beings outside of the Garden (Cain’s wife and the people whom he fears will retaliate for his act of murder).
• The relationship between Genesis 1 and 2 (how does the creation of Adam relate to the creation of humanity in chapter 1?).
• The universal feel of the Adam story (Eve as mother of all living).
• The fact that only death is spoken of as an explicit consequence of Adam’s disobedience, not sin. (Commonly it is asserted that sinfulness as consequence is implied, which raises the question of why something so fundamental to the story of the fall is not mentioned.)

Near literary context of Paul.

• Romans 5:12 seems to say that death is the result of the sin of each individual, not the disobedience of Adam, which does not easily square with the rest of Paul’s argument in chapter 5.
• Paul seems clear in thinking of Adam as a real person whose disobedience led to universal death and sinfulness.

OT canonical context.

• The absence of any overt reference to Adam in the Old Testament after Genesis 5, save 1 Chronciles 1:1, seems significant.
• The parallels between Adam and Israel’s national history seem to be more than coincidental (both are exiled from a lush land for disobedience to law).
• Eve’s choice and Adam’s compliance to seek wisdom (knowledge of good and evil) apart from fearing the Lord (obeying his command) parallels the choice between wisdom and foolishness given in Proverbs.
• Eden is a well-known foreshadowing of Israel’s sanctuaries, which suggests that Adam is more an Israelite (priestly?) figure than the first human.
• Adam is certainly present typologically in the OT (e.g., Noah, Abraham, Moses are “new Adams”), but not in the way that Paul presents Adam, especially in Romans.

NT canonical context.

• Although Adam is mentioned elsewhere (the genealogy in Luke 3, 1 Timothy 2, and Jude 14), Paul alone speaks of Adam as the cause of sin and death.

Cultural context of Genesis.

• When Genesis was written is an extremely relavant factor discerning why it was written, i.e., what we are to expect Genesis to deliver when we read it.
• Ancient Near Eastern origins stories were ubiquitous in the ancient world, and the similarities and differences with Genesis must be accounted for.
• The question of Adam cannot be addressed in isolation from Genesis 1-11 as a whole and its ancient Near Eastern parallels.

Cultural context of Paul.

• Many Jewish writers near the time of Paul talked about Adam, but none of them considered Adam to be the cause of universal sinfulness, which suggests Paul’s reading is not obvious. Also, the diversity of “Adams” in Second Temple Judaism reflects the interpretive “flexible” of the Adam story.
• In keeping with his Jewish context, Paul’s use of the Old Testament in general is marked by a creative approach, centered on Christ, that is not bound to the meaning of the texts in their Old Testament contexts.
• Paul’s unique take on Adam seems to be driven by his mission to put Jews and Gentiles on equal footing before God. Appealing to Adam as he does helps Paul make the case of universal culpability before God. (As it is commonly put in the NT scholarly literature, Paul is arguing from solution to plight.)

Like I said, these are merely a partial list of factors that I feel need to be accounted for in any discussion of Adam. Although have my opinion, I am not implying that all these factors necessarily push you in one direction or another. And if you think there are other pressing matters, by all means comment on them below.

The main point in all of this is that Adam in the Bible is a long, intricate, and ongoing discussion. Slogans and bumpersticker arguments don’t help.

The God of Creation - Why Would God Use 4.6 to 6.2 Billion Years to Create the Earth?

The God of Creation:

Narrative, Hermenuetics, Theology and Creative Evolution

I would refer to N.T. Wright's very theologic and expansive article on The Authority of the Bible (http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/07/nt-wright-how-can-bible-be.html) for explanation as to why God uses process, history and human events to accomplish his redemptive plan for creation. It gets back to my way of thinking of understanding the importance of a literal bible using the historical-critical method of hermeneutic (sic, stories that actually happened!) over the supposition that the bible is compose of ancient mythological texts and fanciful characters. Because ancient biblical history means nothing without the stories (narratives) of God's people - in their failures, hardships, pre-eminence, struggles, lusts, sin, blessings, prayers, broken hearts and spirits. It is within these historical stories that we can find our redemptive relevancy to our present and God's  eternal presence. With his faithfulness, protection, judgments and merciful covenants made with his people. And with all of the historicity found in the midst of our yesterdays, todays and tomorrows clearly in God' view. And when we amass the Bible's very personal,  tribal, or national narratives together we will then discover the much larger themes of biblical meta-narratives that begin to set forth to us the hundreds of theologies we find of God and ourselves - who he is, what he is doing, why he is doing what he is doing, who we are, what our purpose is, our hope is, and our end is - that we may relate to. For without narrative - without process, history and human events - we, as symbolic, visual, linguistic human beings, would not comprehend the Holy Spirit's directive mission of the Father and the Son in judging and remaking creation from sin and evil to complete redemption, orderliness, peace and harmony to the Godhead Three reconciling all things back to Himself.

Otherwise, when we come to the question of time - and lots of it, in the evolutionary model of creation - we discover how important it is to ask the right questions that would give us plenty to talk about as finite beings limited in our temporal footprints upon God's vast and cosmic creation. A creation that is unconstrained by time and space, distance and mass, by either quantum forces or quantum dimensions. For it is the very Creator God himself who is the Big Bang of our lives. The One whom will conquer time and space, the distances and forces of our spiritual lives in order to regain what sin has disrupted and put to ruin; who will put an end to the evil that would continue to mar his holy creation. Jesus' sacrificial atonement is God's redemptive Big Bang that will overcome all willing human souls, restoring order and harmony to sinful hearts fled from the Lover-of-our-souls unto the outer fringes of self-made hells, empty and lost even to ourselves. As the wonders of the universe would overwhelm us as we gaze up into the black nightly heavens, so too are the wonders of our souls to the very God who gazes back into us, into our thoughts and imaginations, our heart and minds, who knows our inner being and seeks to reclaim us back into His holy fellowship. The fellowship of the Three-in-One and One-in-Three. For He is the Alpha and Omega of our created beings; the Beginning and the End of our hearts, our souls, our spirits, our minds and bodies; He is our First and our Last and there is none other God but the great I AM who speaks "peace be still, know ye Thy God."

- skinhead

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The God of Creative Evolution:
Why Would God Use 4.6 to 6.2 Billion Years?
http://musingsonscience.wordpress.com/2011/07/19/why-would-god-use-4-6-billion-years/

by rjs5
posted July 19, 2011

There are a number of comments and questions that come up repeatedly in the discussion of science and faith. One of the issues raised often is the question of time. Why would God take 9 billion years to create a universe ready for the earth and for life? Why would God use 4.6 to 6.2 billion years to create life leading to humans on this earth? [And for that matter, why would God use 14.5 billion years to create the universe or the cosmos that we live in? - skinhead]

Ben Witherington, Amos Professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary, prolific writer and blogger, was at the Pepperdine Christian Scholars conference last month. He was there for a review and discussion of his textbook New Testament Rhetoric, but the conference also featured lectures by Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne on science and faith. Dr. Witherington commented on this conference on his blog last week: The Malibu Blues – Dispelling the Beach Boy’s Myths. OK the post was not really on the conference per se … but the opening paragraph was. And it sets up the question I would like to pose today.

So I go to Pepperdine for the Christian scholars conference and I run into this other alumnus from my period at Carolina—- Francis Collins. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Turns out he became a Christian while he was there, and in fact so did I. So picture us singing the UNC fight song at the science and faith conference. Anyway, he presented an awesome powerpoint lecture on genetic research and its ability to help us cure diseases, and he also talked about creation and evolution in a helpful and non-confrontational way. I was still left wondering why in the world the God who can raise Jesus from the dead in a nano-second would need or bother to set the clock to millions of years until the creation process worked itself up to homo sapiens. It doesn’t really compute.

Do you find it troubling that God used time, massive stretches of time, to achieve his purpose?

Does this raise questions?

This comment by Dr. Witherington was picked up and addressed in the comments where Jonathan and Justin B. responded. First Jonathan:

Regarding the “resurrection in a nanomillennia of history before sending the redeemer. The second coming could have happened more or less immediately, but again God seems to be working over millennia, preparing for that.

“I was still left wondering why in the world the God who can raise Jesus from the dead in a nano-second would need or bother to set the clock to millions of years until the creation process worked itself up to homo sapiens. It doesn’t really compute.”

I don’t think that’s a strike against evolution, though. God doesn’t seem concerned with doing something because we feel He should have done it faster. The same God who raised Jesus from the dead also waited a very long time to send His Son into the world at all.

Dr. Witherington responded to these comments:

Justin I disagree with this analogy. God waited a few thousand years to send his Son, and in between lots was happening God was involved with, like the Exodus or the monarchy. This is no comparison to the apparent millions of years of development leading up to homo sapiens. It really doesn’t make much sense.

God used and uses time. I agree with Jonathan and Justin here – God used and uses time. He used time to form Israel, he used time to bring us to the point of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, and he is using time to move from the incarnation to the new creation, the new heavens and the new earth. We wonder why God worked as he did and is continuing to work as he does. Why did two devout Christian mothers in our church die of cancer this last year, leaving husbands and 6 children between them from elementary school to high school? Why would God use 9 billion years to produce the earth, 4 billion years to produce hominids and something like 140 million years to bring homo sapiens up to the point of culture and community leading to temples, farming, and civilization? To something like Gobeckli Tepe? (Dr. Witherington has a nice series on this site: One, Two, Three, Four – I envy his travels.)

Why didn’t God simply create the new heavens and the new earth? After all decay and sin will have no place in the new creation. If God can do it then why not now? Why not simply start with the ultimate goal? These why questions are necessary as we ponder the majesty of God, his creation, and his interaction with his people. But ultimately we cannot reason ourselves to an answer. What we can do is look at what God did do, the way he creates, the way he interacts with his people and move forward.

When we look at the evidence there is no real doubt. God used long stretches of time create the earth. He used long stretches of time and evolutionary processes to create humans on the earth. He used millenia to bring us to the present. We look at the present, we look at the past, we wonder why … but it does little good to argue against the evidence based on our limited expectation of what God should have done, or what we would have done had we been in the position.

What do you think? Do you agree with Dr. Witherington?

Do the long stretches of time in cause you to wonder?

As a technicality… a nanosecond (10^-9 seconds), for some things, is a long time. Electrons move in attoseconds (10^-18 seconds), atoms in femtoseconds (10^-15 seconds). Light travels a foot in a nanosecond. “Instantaneous” is at least as many orders of magnitude (factors of 10) less than nanosecond as nanosecond is less than second. I don’t think the resurrection was instantaneous – it took time.

And, called to mind by the rest of Dr. Witherington’s post … Surfin’ USA:

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net

If you have comments please visit Why Would God Use 4.6 Billion Years? at Jesus Creed

What is Theology?

Why we do not need theology

http://www.postost.net/2011/07/why-we-do-not-need-theology

by Andrew Perriman

Tuesday 26 July 2011

• Hermeneutics and narrative

 

Is the Bible a collection of historical texts stuck in the past? Is it a sacred text that transcends and overrules its historical origins? Or do we somehow have to hold these two perspectives in tension?

 

By and large, (1) historical-critical approaches to biblical interpretation assume the first perspective; (2) popular faith-motivated approaches assume the second. (3) Modern evangelical scholarship, meanwhile, generally wants to have its cake and eat it, holding out for some version of the third position: first, we establish what the text once meant; then we consider what it now means. But this is a rather unstable and perhaps even spurious compromise, and the Bible remains at the centre of a strenuous tug-of-war between the historians and the theologians.

 

One of those pulling hard for the theologians is Joel Green. In Seized by Truth: Reading the Bible as Scripture he observes that, following the postmodern shift, we have come to regard all knowledge as “historically grounded”, and he asks how this recognition impinges upon biblical studies.

It has led to the assumption that the only viable history within which to construe the meaning of biblical texts is the history within which those texts were generated—or the history to which those texts give witness. The results for Christian theology and preaching have often been disastrous, since it is difficult to construe the meaning for contemporary times of a biblical text whose meaning properly belongs to an ancient time. (1)

This is the central problem posed by a historical hermeneutic: if biblical meaning properly belongs to an ancient past, of what use is it for us today? Biblical truth becomes nothing more than an assortment of corroded artefacts—primitive tools, crude items of jewellery, roughly shaped dishes—dug from an ancient site. We might display them in a museum, with explanatory notices for the benefit of visitors. They are remarkable items. But we would not dream of making everyday use of them.

This is rightly intolerable to evangelicals—indeed, to anyone who wants to believe that the Bible is formative for the people of God today.

Green’s solution will be to prioritize theology over history, to construe the historical texts theologically as transcendent scripture—that much can be inferred from the title of the book. The problem with this approach is that inevitably the historical voice will be distorted or suppressed, and the Bible will be made to say things that it does not want to say. The ancient artefacts will be discreetly replaced with cheap shiny replicas which won’t look out of place in the modern household—the sort of stuff that you buy in the gift shop on the way out of the museum.

I think this is a mistake and ultimately a betrayal of the Bible as scripture. My view is that we do not need to wrap the Bible in a modern user-friendly “theology” in order for it to have practical value for the church. What makes the Bible meaningful for us, what makes it scripture, is not that universally applicable moral and religious truths can be extracted from it—though undoubtedly some can—but that it establishes a narrative trajectory. It points in a certain direction.

The New Testament points the early redeemed church in the direction of vindication—first with respect to apostate Judaism, secondly with respect to European paganism. If we step back a bit, I think we then see how the Bible as a whole points the people of God always towards the prospect of new creation, of which it is both a concrete embodiment and a prophetic sign.

But this narrative trajectory—this pointing—can be thoroughly described without introducing a ‘disastrous’ schism between theology and history. In scripture theology is grounded historically; [and] history [can be] interpreted theologically. This is why prophecy is such a critical component in biblical discourse—it is the realistic theological interpretation of historical events, past, present, and future. [prophecy = theology]

(1) Joel B. Green, Seized by Truth: Reading the Bible as Scripture, Abingdon Press, 2007, 14-15.

Recovering Theological Perspective Through Narrative

New Perspective and Reformed theologies at a crossroads

http://www.postost.net/2010/11/new-perspective-reformed-theologies-crossroads

by Andrew Perriman

Tuesday 09 November 2010

• Campbell, Deliverance of God
• Hermeneutics and narrative
• New Perspective

Weighing down God's Word
with our Presuppositions

Jim Hoag has a couple of pertinent questions about my “Postconservative evangelicalism and beyond” post—pertinent, in fact, to the point that he makes me wonder whether the piece had much in the way of substance to it at all. The first question has to do with what we understand by the “New Perspective”, the second with my nifty but perhaps vacuous metaphor of a narrative-historical hermeneutics cutting across the “dominant paradigms of modern theology at ninety degrees”.

The New Perspective—associated principally with writers such as Sanders, Dunn, Hays, and Wright—is a rather loose category that is going to mean different things to different people. It is also a work in progress. It started out largely as an attempt to correct the very negative presentation of Judaism as a religion of legalistic works-righteousness that has held sway over much New Testament interpretation and theology. But since this was essentially a historical correction, it has given a powerful impetus more broadly to research into the historical setting and scope of Paul’s argumentation. In effect, it has done for Paul what successive quests for the historical Jesus have done for Jesus.

I would place recent imperial-critical research (Crossan, Horsley, Lopez) in this trajectory, though it has a habit of going off at a tangent; and my own argument in The Future of the People of God is that Paul’s thought in Romans is governed by a forward-looking narrative about the place of the emerging churches of the nations in a troubled process that effectively culminated in the victory of Christ over the gods and powers of the Greek-Roman world.

Douglas Campbell has some excellent things to say regarding how the “superstructure” of a theological theory (such as Justification theory) may distort or overwhelm the reading of the “base”—the primary texts—on which it was originally constructed. The poor donkey of scripture gets overloaded with a weight of self-substantiating theory that it simply cannot sustain.

We have seen that in the case of a scripturally constructed and authenticated explanation the reading is prior and fundamental; it generates and then supports the explanation as base to superstructure.

The images below are tarted up versions of Campbell’s diagrams (238). In the first one the base of the texts properly supports the superstructure of theory—Campbell is careful not to pretend that we can dispense with “theology”.

But the theory—the superstructure—proceeds to take on a life of its own:

But the resulting theory, once established, possesses its own integrity and coherence…, to the point that it is largely detachable from its underlying texts.

Then, of course, what happens is that for all sorts of complex sociological and historical reasons the theory comes increasingly to “intrude prematurely into the act of reading that supposedly undergirds it” (The Deliverance of God, 237, Campbell’s emphasis)—quite understandable, but “epistemologically disastrous”. Campbell then goes on to describe how “Any illegitimate epistemological causality flowing from the superstructure to the base may be cloaked in a variety ways” (238)—a covert art that we are all remarkably adept at.

So in this second picture the epistemological current has been reversed: the theoretical superstructure, which I have taken the liberty of enlarging to indicate its oppressive function, controls the reading of the base texts, with potentially distorting effect.

So when I suggested that the “New Perspective offers us the best chance of ensuring that in the process we remain loyal to scripture”, what I had in mind was its capacity to swim against the current of an ‘illegitimate epistemological causality”—to resist the distorting effect generated by the sociological success of currently dominant paradigms.

The slightly fuzzy New Perspective topples the bullying theological theory and lets scripture speak with its own voice again (this is purely my contribution to the schematics):

The question will then be whether a constructive and credible tension can be maintained between an appropriate historical-critical methodology and an authentically and potently evangelical commitment. I am confident that it can.

My way of dealing with this challenge would be to foreground the narrative structure of New Testament thought, as the locus at which history, literature and theological argumentation converge. A narrative-historical methodology makes us ask different questions; it pushes context into view; it forestalls theological precommitments; it makes the text strange again; it safeguards the contingent dimensions of the texts; it identifies real and urgent rather than remote and speculative concerns; it grounds language in corporate experience; it has an ear for scriptural and cultural resonances; and so on…

The theology that emerges from this hermeneutical realignment ought to retain a narrative shape and momentum. It will have a diachronic structure—theology as an active, critical, prophetic, hopeful engagement with historical realities in the light of earlier moment in the story. That is a very different model to the largely synchronic function of systematic, conceptually organized, modern theologies (Calvinism, Arminianism, modern evangelicalism, etc.) which, as Campbell points out, effectively pre-empt biblical interpretation. The metaphor of narrative-historical interpretation at ninety degrees to the traditional paradigm attempts to capture that realignment, which of course is just another metaphor, maybe just the same metaphor, for this complex hermeneutical shift—and so it goes on.

My own view is that modern theological paradigms cannot in the long run survive the emerging critique—I think the phrase “vindication of an eschatological community through faithfulness” simply gets at the core of Paul’s argument in Romans much more accurately than the Reformation axiom about the justification of lost individuals by faith. But it will certainly be a long run, and there is no reason in principle (practice is always another matter) why the transition should not proceed by way of dialogue rather than conflict and schism.

“Missio Dei” in historical perspectives, part 1

Perriman's "Missio Dei" articles (Parts 1, 2, 3) seem to me a good example of what a "whole bible meta-narrative" might look like as we enter into this postmodern age of "grand storytelling" (not in the mythic sense, but in a true historic sense). It proposes what seems legitimate origins, plots, storylines, conflicts, resolutions, and conclusions to the purposes of God in this world utilizing biblical covenants, themes, salvific events and progress, personal/tribal/national narratives, redemptive histories, eschatological hope, apocalytic progress, and secular human history as supports for its arguments. Old and New Testament Introductions and thematic Biblical-Theological Studies have said as much and I would expect yet more contextualized "Grand Narratives" to come forward as theologians revisit church and world movements post-Messiah (or pre-Parousia!).

To this I question Barth's claimed influence, Constantinople's "Christianized" empire, or Europe's "Christianizing" cultures beyond anything more than gross acclamations among other critiques. But Perriman's overall theme and concluding thoughts show themselves to be a good working propostion,  in that the world has now heard the gospel of Jesus and that the church is in the early postmodernistic stages of expanding the Creator God's rule and reign over all aspects of human culture and civilization. It is then, a narrative theology that restuctures the church's mission, and one that could align itself with the propositions and practices of the newly arising "emergent church culture."

Overall, we should not be suprised that popular church movements bear some relationship to the worldly culture that we know and to grand propagandized themes (in a positive sense) "reforming" its at-large enterprise or activities. For Christian movements are just that, and hopefully, if they are reflective of the "better themes of the bible" (like grace, forgiveness, peace, harmony) we can find personal identification with them and with past historical truths that previous church ages have uncovered, testified of, and submitted to. This then keeps such a movement from being overtly "sectarian" or altogether "cultic" and misleading.

R.E. Slater

June 9, 2011

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Missio Dei” in historical perspectives, part 1

http://www.postost.net/2011/01/missio-dei-historical-perspectives-part-1

Andrew Perriman

Monday 10 January 2011

The idea that the mission of the church is in the first place the mission of God or missio Dei has its origins in the thought of Karl Barth. A good summary of its development can be found in David Bosch’s Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (389-93).1

Barth’s argument that mission must be understood as an activity or attribute of God himself was first proposed in a paper given at the Brandenburg Missionary Conference in 1932. The full concept was articulated in 1952 at the Willingen Conference of the International Missionary Council. Mission was understood to derive from the Trinitarian nature of God: the Father sends the Son; the Father and the Son send the Spirit; and the Trinitarian God sends the church into the world as a dynamic embodiment of divine love towards creation. Bosch encapsulates the paradigm shift involved:

Mission is thereby seen as a movement from God to the world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission…. There is church because there is mission, not vice versa…. To participate in mission is to participate in the movement of God’s love toward people, since God is a fountain of sending love. (390)

Mission, therefore, can no longer be seen merely as the practical extension of the church: it has to be understood fundamentally as a representation of God:

The primary purpose of the missiones ecclesiae can therefore not simply be the planting of churches or the saving of souls; rather, it has to be service to the missio Dei, representing God in and over against the world, pointing to God, holding up the God-child before the eyes of the world in a ceaseless celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany. In its mission, the church witnesses to the fullness of the promise of God’s reign and participates in the ongoing struggle between that reign and the powers of darkness and evil…. (391) 

Keep to the right…

This shift of focus away from the activity of the church towards the activity of God, however, exposed a critical bifurcation in the argument, a fork in the road—and many theologians took the concept of missio Dei in a direction altogether unintended by Barth and the German missiologists. Bosch traces the development back to Vatican II (391-392). If the church participates in the mission of God, the possibility arises that the mission of God in the world may be thought to happen more or less independently of the church. In effect, the connection established at Willingen between the mission of God and the sending of the church could be undone and the missio Dei restated in rather different terms.

The outcome is that “the church encounters a humanity and a world in which God’s salvation has already been operative secretly, through the Spirit”. The mission of God comes to be understood as the Spirit-driven betterment of humanity, and the church may—or may not—choose to align itself with this historical process. Bosch quotes P.G. Aring: “We have no business in ‘articulating’ God. In the final analysis, ‘missio Dei’ means that God articulates himself, without any need of assisting him through our missionary efforts in this respect” (392).
This development led many to question the usefulness of the missio Dei concept. Bosch argues, however, that it still serves to safeguard the critical theological insight that mission is “primarily and ultimately, the work of the Triune God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, for the sake of the world, a ministry in which the church is privileged to participate” (392).

The missional incarnational development

These tensions remain in evidence—many would complain, for example, that Brian McLaren took the wrong turning in Everything Must Change, with its apparent eclipse of the church and reinterpretation of the kingdom of God as a process of global social transformation. But the current popularity of the missio Dei concept amongst progressive and emerging churches probably has more to do with the theological support it lends to the argument about incarnational mission. If the church participates in the sending of the Son, then mission should have the same same basic incarnational structure. This accounts for the emphasis on following or imitating Jesus, and is readily translated into a broad range of centrifugal missional practices. So, for example, the Missio Dei community in Minneapolis describes itself as “following Jesus’ way of hospitality, simplicity, prayer, peacemaking, and resistance”.

This is what the whole thing looks like in colour:

All this has been by way of introduction. The question I will consider in the next part has to do with the relation of the concept to scripture. How does the Bible define the mission of God? And in particular, should we be thinking in terms of a single overarching definition or does the missional activity of God need to be contextualized historically? My guess is the latter….

________________________________

1. See also C.J.H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (IVP Academic, 2006), 62-65.

“Missio Dei” in historical perspectives, part 2

Perriman's "Missio Dei" articles (Parts 1, 2, 3) seem to me a good example of what a "whole bible meta-narrative" might look like as we enter into this postmodern age of "grand storytelling" (not in the mythic sense, but in a true historic sense). It proposes what seems legitimate origins, plots, storylines, conflicts, resolutions, and conclusions to the purposes of God in this world utilizing biblical covenants, themes, salvific events and progress, personal/tribal/national narratives, redemptive histories, eschatological hope, apocalytic progress, and secular human history as supports for its arguments. Old and New Testament Introductions and thematic Biblical-Theological Studies have said as much and I would expect yet more contextualized "Grand Narratives" to come forward as theologians revisit church and world movements post-Messiah (or pre-Parousia!).

To this I question Barth's claimed influence, Constantinople's "Christianized" empire, or Europe's "Christianizing" cultures beyond anything more than gross acclamations among other critiques. But Perriman's overall theme and concluding thoughts show themselves to be a good working propostion, in that the world has now heard the gospel of Jesus and that the church is in the early postmodernistic stages of expanding the Creator God's rule and reign over all aspects of human culture and civilization. It is then, a narrative theology that restuctures the church's mission, and one that could align itself with the propositions and practices of the newly arising "emergent church culture."

Overall, we should not be suprised that popular church movements bear some relationship to the worldly culture that we know and to grand propagandized themes (in a positive sense) "reforming" its at-large enterprise or activities. For Christian movements are just that, and hopefully, if they are reflective of the "better themes of the bible" (like grace, forgiveness, peace, harmony) we can find personal identification with them and with past historical truths that previous church ages have uncovered, testified of, and submitted to. This then keeps such a movement from being overtly "sectarian" or altogether "cultic" and misleading.

R.E. Slater

June 9, 2011

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Missio Dei” in historical perspectives, part 2

http://www.postost.net/2011/01/missio-dei-historical-perspectives-part-2

Andrew Perriman

Tuesday 11 January 2011

In The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative Chris Wright follows David Bosch’s analysis and comes to the same basic conclusion—that the phrase missio Dei remains valuable because it expresses a major biblical truth: “The God revealed in the Scriptures is personal, purposeful and goal-orientated” (63). He sums up the overarching mission of God in these terms:

…from the great promise of God to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 we know this God to be totally, covenantally and eternally committed to the mission of blessing the nations through the agency of the people of Abraham.

This commitment of the missional God may then be located within a biblical metanarrative that moves from creation, through human rebellion, to the extensive “story of God’s redemptive purposes being worked out on the stage of human history”, culminating beyond history “with the eschatological hope of a new creation” (63-64). In other words, the mission of God from Genesis 11 through to the end of history is the blessing of the nations, by which is meant the redemption of humanity.

The problem with this conventional construction is that not only the bulk of the biblical narrative but also, in effect, the whole of human history is placed under the single heading of “redemption”. There are two assumptions entailed here that do not normally come up for discussion in missiological conversations. The first is that the mission of God never changes—that the living, dynamic God of history always engages with humanity with fundamentally the same objective in mind. The second is that this unchanging objective is always and simply to be understood as a work of redemption.

Neither assumption is simply false, but as far as the interpretation of scripture is concerned, both are overstated—they have been inflated to the level of absolute and total definition, and in the process a narrative theme of critical historical, theological and, I would argue, canonical significance has been squeezed out.

It is correct to state i) that the mission of God in scripture is worked out, as Chris Wright says, under the rubric of the blessing of the nations through the agency of the family of Abraham, and ii) that this mission at a certain juncture and in a certain sense included the “salvation” of both Jews and Gentiles. But there is a thick, but neglected, narrative seam running right through scripture, which needs to be written back into our missiology and our account of the mission of God—and, for that matter, into our understanding of the authority of scripture. This narrative determines in an unexpected way the conditions under which the promise to Abraham would be fulfilled; it also contains within itself the core biblical argument about salvation. But as a historical narrative it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; and this opens up the possibility that subsequently the missio Dei may need to be stated in different forms under different circumstances.

Every knee shall bow: the victory of YHWH over the nations

The main storyline in scripture, I would argue—the storyline that best accounts for the shape of scripture, that best holds its disparate materials together—is not the redemptive one. It is rather the story of the conflict between YHWH and the gods of the nations, which is concretely a conflict between the people of YHWH and the nations, culminating in the acknowledgment of the rightness of Israel’s God throughout the pagan world. According to this storyline the missio Dei would be the struggle of Israel’s God—that is, of the one good creator God—to establish his sovereignty over the nations. It is grounded in the intention to bless the nations, and it includes the “salvation” of people from the nations; but it is constitutive of the biblical narrative in a way which these other elements are not.

The story begins with the response of God to the presumption of the builders of Babel, which is a precursor of Babylon: first, judgment on the large-scale self-aggrandizement of humanity, then the calling of Abraham to be the father of a new creation. Israel emerges as a nation by way of an intense conflict with the gods of Egypt. The rivalry between YHWH and the Canaanite and other regional deities escalates throughout the period of the kingdoms, and reaches its climax in the Babylonian invasion and the exile as YHWH’s judgment on an idolatrous people. Isaiah expresses the hope that Israel will be restored, but more importantly this act of salvation will be a demonstration to the nations that “there is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Saviour”. “To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance” (Is. 45:22-23).

So Paul’s argument in Philippians 2:6-11 is that it is through the faithfulness and obedience of Jesus that this conversion of the pagan world will come about: “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”. I made the point in The Coming of the Son of Man that the parousia motif, the symbolic account of Jesus’ “coming”, is a prophetic statement regarding the final vindication of Jesus and of those “in him” in the context of the church’s struggle with Greek-Roman paganism. It defines the moment when Jesus will defeat the “man of lawlessness”—the arrogant and blasphemous pagan ruler who makes himself equal with God—and will deliver the church from its afflictions (cf. 2 Thess. 2:1-12). Finally, we have the account of divine judgment on Rome in Revelation, when the “kingdom of the world” becomes the “kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” (Rev. 11:15).

As soon as we begin to ask how this language works historically, it becomes apparent that the core biblical story, the story that determines the missio Dei, is not open-ended. It is contingent, it is constrained, it is contextualized. It unfolds between the judgment of God against Babel which was Babylon to the overthrow of “Babylon” which was Rome. The background or overarching story of creation and the renewal of creation shows through in places, but in the foreground is the drawn-out conflict between YHWH and the gods of the nations.

This narrative, however, is enacted not at a mythical or metaphysical level. It is enacted in the historical existence of a people, which is where the salvation motif comes into play. Plan A for Israel was that it would keep the Law, that it would be blessed by YHWH, that its prosperity and political integrity would be safeguarded, that it would be a model of righteousness, a blessing to the nations, a light to the Gentiles, and that YHWH would be acknowledged amongst Israel’s powerful neighbours as the one true God.

Plan A failed because Israel proved to be as much the helpless slave of sin as the rest of humanity, so Plan B came into effect. Plan B was that the victory of YHWH over the gods of the nations would have to be achieved by way of a protracted narrative of failure, judgment and suffering—a theme that runs at least from the Song of Moses (Deut. 32), through Isaiah 53, Daniel 7 (and the stories of the Maccabean martyrs), through the cross of Jesus, the crisis of second temple Judaism, to the sufferings of the apostles and of the churches persecuted by Rome.

So what is actually achieved in the biblical story—from the first emergence of Babylonian-style empire to the victory of the suffering people of God over the “Babylon” which was Rome—was the acknowledgment of YHWH as the one good creator God. A crucial part of this story, of course, is told by the writers of the New Testament prospectively or prophetically—the New Testament is a work of eschatological hope. But it is told in a way which makes it clear, I think, that this foundational missio Dei comes to an end in history; and this naturally raises the question of what comes next....

“Missio Dei” in historical perspectives, part 3

Perriman's "Missio Dei" articles (Parts 1, 2, 3) seem to me a good example of what a "whole bible meta-narrative" might look like as we enter into this postmodern age of "grand storytelling" (not in the mythic sense, but in a true historic sense). It proposes what seems legitimate origins, plots, storylines, conflicts, resolutions, and conclusions to the purposes of God in this world utilizing biblical covenants, themes, salvific events and progress, personal/tribal/national narratives, redemptive histories, eschatological hope, apocalytic progress, and secular human history as supports for its arguments. Old and New Testament Introductions and thematic Biblical-Theological Studies have said as much and I would expect yet more contextualized "Grand Narratives" to come forward as theologians revisit church and world movements post-Messiah (or pre-Parousia!).

To this I question Barth's claimed influence, Constantinople's "Christianized" empire, or Europe's "Christianizing" cultures beyond anything more than gross acclamations among other critiques. But Perriman's overall theme and concluding thoughts show themselves to be a good working propostion, in that the world has now heard the gospel of Jesus and that the church is in the early postmodernistic stages of expanding the Creator God's rule and reign over all aspects of human culture and civilization. It is then, a narrative theology that restuctures the church's mission, and one that could align itself with the propositions and practices of the newly arising "emergent church culture."

Overall, we should not be suprised that popular church movements bear some relationship to the worldly culture that we know and to grand propagandized themes (in a positive sense) "reforming" its at-large enterprise or activities. For Christian movements are just that, and hopefully, if they are reflective of the "better themes of the bible" (like grace, forgiveness, peace, harmony) we can find personal identification with them and with past historical truths that previous church ages have uncovered, testified of, and submitted to. This then keeps such a movement from being overtly "sectarian" or altogether "cultic" and misleading.

R.E. Slater

June 9, 2011

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Missio Dei” in historical perspectives, part 3

http://www.postost.net/2011/01/missio-dei-historical-perspectives-part-3

Andrew Perriman

Friday 14 January 2011

I started out with a brief history of the missio Dei concept from its origins in Karl Barth’s argument that mission is essentially an attribute of the Triune God, not an activity of the church, to the appropriation of the term by the missional church movement. I then suggested that as a matter of biblical interpretation it makes more sense to understand the mission of God in terms of the escalating conflict between the one good creator God of Israel and the gods of the nations that routinely threatened the political and religious integrity of the people of God, culminating symbolically in the parousia event of the victory of the suffering churches over the “Babylon” which was Rome. So then what?

The Christendom narrative

Historically speaking, the victory of Israel’s God over the pagan world through the faithfulness of Jesus and of those in him was the conversion of the empire under Constantine and Theodosius. This, I think, brings the driving narrative of scripture to an end. There remains a sketchy outer narrative about the continuing witness of the descendants of Abraham to the renewal of creation as the basis for the blessing of the nations. But the core narrative of how this people came to inherit the world (cf. Rom. 4:13), with all its crises of judgment and salvation, has been told (keeping in mind that a significant part of it has been told prophetically).

So what happened to the missio Dei under Christendom? I would suggest that in effect it took the form of the creation of a European Christian society, a politically underpinned assertion of the lordship or “kingdom” established at the end of the biblical narrative, with a coherent, rational and universalized Christian worldview, that would eventually be exported to the rest of the world, held accountable internally (as ancient Israel had been) by movements of dissent and renewal.

That may not be how we would now choose to characterize the mission of God during that period; and I would not want to suggest that the New Testament foresaw how the success of the witness of the early church would turn out. But I think it represents roughly how the European church from Constantine onwards would have formulated its understanding of the missio Dei.

Missio Dei after Christendom

Here is what we have so far. As a biblical people we must frame everything with a story of the God who created and who will re-create. Within that frame we have the response of YHWH to the rebellion of humanity in the form of the calling of Abraham to be the progenitor of a new humanity through which the original blessing of creation would be recovered. But that calling already has the seeds of the central biblical story about the defeat of the gods of “Babylon” in the end through the experience of redemptive suffering.

This dominant biblical narrative is then followed by the story of the development, expansion, and eventual decline of the European church—the troubled and glorious story of western Christendom. It is not a finished story, and there may be some pages, perhaps even chapters, still to be written. But I think that just as Rome put an end to second temple Judaism, so modern secular rationalism has put an end to the Christendom paradigm, and the people of God finds itself again in a wilderness of transition.

So how do we reformulate the missio Dei? How do we now speak about the engagement of the one good creator God with his creation through the family of Abraham, which is called always to be a new creation, renewed through the Spirit and under Christ as Lord? It seems to me that we have to take these three factors into consideration:

• The fundamental responsibility to acknowledge and worship the one good creator God and to affirm the created nature of all things;

• The seminal vocation of the family of Abraham to recover the original blessing of creation and be the means by which the nations are blessed;

• The large-scale historical narratives that have brought us to the present situation of the church: the biblical narrative of the victory of the marginal God of Abraham over pagan empire; and the post-biblical narrative of the rise and fall of western Christendom.

The good news that we have in this time of eschatological transition is that in different ways the creator God, who made all things through and for Jesus, is still active in the world—that there are abundant signs of reformation and transformation, that the churches are beginning to rediscover the scope of their new creational mandate, that a vision is emerging of a concrete alternative existence, in dynamic relation to the creator, which will function credibly as a prophetic counterpoint to the weighty distortions and injustices of contemporary global society. A new story is beginning to be told.

The advantage of relativizing the missio Dei in this way is that it forces the church to think much more deeply and contextually about its present condition and the opportunities and challenges that this presents. For the most part we have no wish to reinstate the imperializing “mission” of the Christendom era—that is now history, and we may be happy to see the back of it. But by the same token, we are not now engaged in the drawn out and painful contest between the seemingly inconsequential God of Israel and the powerful gods of the Greek-Roman oikoumenē.

I suggest that the missio Dei for the church in the age to come will have to be increasingly defined in creational terms as a response to the globalization of the challenges confronting humanity: damage to the environment, food and energy shortages, population growth, the struggle of incompatible cultures to co-exist in shrinking and depleted social spaces, and so on. It is now the creator God and the Son who is firstborn of all creation, through whom and for whom all things were made, and the re-creative, inventive Spirit who send the church into the world to embody—both actually and prophetically—the possibility of renewed humanity in the midst of the peoples of the earth.

The Bible as Meta-Narrative

Saving the Theological Cat

http://newwaystheology.blogspot.com/2011/04/saving-theological-cat.html

by Mason Slater

April 28, 2011

If the bible is a story, or more accurately a library of storied testimonies which together tell a Story, that should shape how we study it, teach it, and live it. Right?

What would that look like though? Because it doesn’t seem like it would all that closely resemble the way we tend to approach the Bible today.

Sure, there are a few scholars who are trying to work out a storied approach to the Scriptures, and a number of pastors who are shifting the art of the sermon in response to this way of understanding the Bible. For that I’m thankful. They do seem to be in the minority though, and I’m not sure even those steps are enough to grapple with the paradigm shift this sets up.

See the concept of “story” is central to me for another reason as well, the role it plays in writing. As I’ve made my faltering attempts at putting down something worthwhile on paper or screen I’ve jumped at anything (books, blogs, disciplines) that could refine my writing. In the process I’ve noticed something.

People who tell stories professionally approach the task quite differently than (most) people who teach the Bible professionally.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, each has its strengths and weaknesses, but it is worth noting. Much professional study of Scripture feels highly scientific, filled with lengthy footnotes, parsing Greek verbs, and charts (Oh the charts!). Those things are needed, and actually there is a science to storytelling as well.

The difference seems to be this: storytellers learn the method and then tell stories (or teach English to apathetic high schoolers), whereas theologians often learn the method and then spend most of their time talking about the method. This seems to somewhat miss the point.

I know I’m painting with broad strokes here, and there are plenty of exceptions in both theology and storytelling. But on the whole, it seems to fit.

So I’ve taken up reading books about storytelling. This began as a way to help sort out my writing, but it has ended up being a valuable theological practice as well.

Right now it’s Save The Cat! (thanks to a recommendation by Don Miller), which is directed at screenwriters and focuses on issues like plot, characters, and archetypes. Besides being a great read, it also has helped me as a reader and teacher of Scripture. Next up will be James Bell (the less heretical of the Bells) with Plot & Structure .

Theology matters, but it matters as a tool. As N.T. Wright puts it, theology is a convenient shorthand for different elements of the story. We need the shorthand to speak coherently, but we also need to be able to unpack the story itself.

How might a storied reading of Scripture change how we do theology?

What resources could be helpful in that shift?

Bonus unfiltered musing: Is it possible to do theology as story? Jesus seemed to in the parables...