To make the truth inaccessible
So I was reading a review of "Frank and Casper Go To Church" at amazon.com, and one reviewer said this:
If the aim was to increase the church's sensitivity in making things more accessible to the masses of un-churched, we must take into consideration that not even Jesus was understood by all his contemporaries. He used parables to make truth accessible, and they still did not understand (Matt. 13:14, 15).Except that if you read Matt. 13:11-13 you get a very different story. Jesus used parables not "to make truth accessible" but rather to hide it from those unworthy of hearing it. He explicitly says so when asked why he uses parables and, in fact, this is the place where the infamous "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath" is spoken.
Jesus had the secret of how to get to heaven, but he chose to speak (like some oracle or wizard in a bad fantasy novel) in parables and riddles to prevent the wrong people from finding it out. And then he damned them to hell for not getting it...
This attitude is, of course, mirroring that of the Old Testament, where God would routinely harden someone's heart and then kill them because their heart was hard. (Or kill others, like, oh, all the Egyptian babies.) Knowledge of God is a gift and God decides who's worthy and who isn't. And hey, that's fine. Assuming God exists, who's going to tell him how to run the universe? It's not very nice, it's not fair, it's not exactly good, but it's his game.
What gets me is the way Christians try to pretend that this isn't the way God works - even to ignoring the plain meaning of the words they quote Jesus saying.
Matthew, Chapter 13 (from the Unbound Bible:
10. And the disciples came and said to Him, "Why do You speak to them in parables?"
11. Jesus answered them, "To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted.
12. "For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.
13. "Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.
14. "In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says, `You will keep on hearing, but will not understand;
you will keep on seeing, but will not perceive;
15. for the heart of this people has become dull,
with their ears they scarcely hear,
and they have closed their eyes,
otherwise they would see with their eyes,
and understand with their heart and return,
and I would heal them.'
16. "But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear.
17. "For truly I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.
Labels: freethought
1 Comments:
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At 10:03 AM, October 20, 2008
Anonymous had this to say...
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<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->[Note: I write this as an ex-Christian, i.e. from a perspective that combines direct experience of Christianity with a lack of acceptance of it.]
To play devil's advocate here, one idea that's fairly common among Christians is that the people who are worthy of knowing the truth are those who seek it for the purest motives. Much ink can be spilt discussing what those motives might be (or for that matter what "the truth" might be), but I think it's a perspective worth considering, if you're going to philosophise about what Jesus is saying here. It leads to a more palatable interpretation of what it means to hide the truth from the unworthy.
A problem with this solution may be that if one thing is obvious in the history of religion, it's that every tenent of Christianity involving a propositional statement is accepted by a great many people without any honorable motives. To argue (as every non-fundamentalist Christian will) that the essence of Christianity is non-propositional is reasonable in itself, but not relevant here, as it doesn't help (so far as I can see) to explain what Jesus meant about parables.
William Barclay, the famous commentator, reads Matthew 13 differently from you. I don't have his commentary on that passage, but an excerpt follows from his commentary on Luke 8:4-15.
Verses 9 and 10 have always been puzzling. It sounds as if Jesus is saying that he spoke in parables so that people would not be able to understand; but we cannot believe he would deliberately cloak his meaning from his listeners. Various explanations have been suggested.
(1) Matthew 13:13 puts it slightly differently. He says that Jesus spoke in parables because people could not rightly see and understand. Matthew seems to say that it was not to hinder people from seeing and understanding but to help them that Jesus so spoke.
(2) Matthew quotes immediately after this a saying of Isaiah 6:9-10, which in effect says, "I have spoken to them the word of God and the only result is that they have not understood a word of it." So then the saying of Jesus may indicate not the object of his teaching in parables but the result of it.
(3) What Jesus really meant is this - people can become so dull and heavy and blunted in mind that when God's truth comes to them they cannot see it. It is not God's fault. They have become so mentally lazy, so blinded by prejudice, so unwilling to see anything they do not want to see, that they have become incapable of assimilating God's truth.
Barclay's commentary is hardly adequate. In point three he seems to have forgotten the subject of parables altogether. Point two raises a question that is raised all over the Bible: shouldn't the creator of the universe have a better grasp of human psychology? But I offer you Barclay's commentary as the perspective of a widely respected mainstream Biblical scholar.
I hope I've been reasonably coherent here, despite being quite tired. I aim to provide food for thought.
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