Understanding parables: A developmental analysis

zyxwv zyxwvu zyxw Biblical parables are interpreted through the lens of one’s stage of religious judgment, as described by Oser and Gmiinder. zyxwvu Understanding Parables: A Developmental Analysis Anton A. Bucher Theory and Purpose In the early 1960s.Ronald Goldman (1964) provided an insightful analysis of children’s understanding of parables. That analysis explained the development of religious thinking from a Piageaan perspective. Development of thinking about parables, then, was explained in terms of Piaget‘s stages of intuitive (pre-operational), concrete-operational, and formal operational thinking. Although the Goldman study marked a significant step beyond mere description of changes with age, it did not give us a way to understand the development of religious thinking as a unique domain calling for unique structures of thought. The study here assumed that religious thinking is derived from both general Piagetian and specific religious thought structures. Those specific religious thought structures have been defined in the research of Oser and Gmunder (1988; see Oser, this volume). Though their work is reviewed elsewhere in this volume, it is useful here to summarize essentials. In brief, religious judgment (thinking) depends on how we structure the God-person relationship. Furthermore, understanding of this relationship develops as a progression of stages described as follows: In Stage 1. the Ultimate Being protects or hurts, dispenses health or illness, and influences each of us directly but without our influence and control (deus ex machina). The Ultimate Being is an anthropomorphic and powerful being who intervenes directly into the affairs of people. In Stage 2, the Ultimate Being continues to be humanlike and to act directly, but now he or she can be influenced by prayers, offerings, adherence to religious rules, N w haECnONs FOR CHILD DEVELORIEN~.no. 52. Summer 1591 @ J ~ 8 a sInc.. s Publirhm 101 zy 102 zyxwvu zyxwvut zyxwvut zyxwvu RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE and so on (do et des, ‘give so that you may receive’). In Stage 3, we assume full responsibility for our lives; transcendence is outside ourselves and may be either rejected or doubted as irrelevant to everyday living. In Stage 4, the Ultimate Being becomes the condition for human freedom, independence, and so on via the divine plan. And in Stage Five, the Ultimate Being inhabits each human interactional commitment but also transcends it at the same time. The purpose of my pilot study was to show just how the Oser-Gmunder model helps explain the development of understanding of parables. The Study zyxwv Twenty-eight Swiss subjects, ages seven to fifty (equally divided between male and female and half younger than thirteen), were tested for their respective stages of religious judgment using Oser and Gmunder’s “Paul dilemma.” This vignette asks subjects to judge whether someone who had just survived an airplane crash should carry out a promise made to God as the plane was about to crash (see Oser, this volume). In addition, subjects were engaged in semistmctured interviews about their understanding of two parables from the New Testament: the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matt. 2O:l-16) and the parable of the talents (Matt. 2514-30). The first parable tells a story of a master who hires laborers, for all or part of one day, to work his vineyard and pays them all the same regardless of the time of day they were hired. In this parable, the laborers hired at the beginning of the day object to the equal pay being given to those hired later. The second parable tells a story of a master who entrusts his property or “talents“ to three servants while he goes on a journey. Upon his return, the master rewards the two servants who had invested his property wisely and punishes the servant who had simply buried it in the ground for safekeeping. Levels of Understanding. The protocols and results revealed three levels of how parables are understood. Level 1: Concrete-Literal. The youngest children took the parables to be true stones about events in Jesus’s time. Here is an example from a seven-year-old: Do you think this story (parable of the laborers in the vineyard) really happened? CHILD: sure. INTERVIEWER: And where did it happen? CHILD:Abroad, somewhere, when Jesus was alive. INTERVIEWER: And in our village might a story that means the same happen here also? CHILD: No, it won’t. INTERVIEWER: zyxw zyxwv UNDULSTANDING PARABLES INTERVIEWER: And why? 103 CHILD:Because Jesus wasn’t here; he couldn’t have seen it. When pressed as to possible religious analogies in the parables-for example, “Might the master in the story be an image of God himself?’’-the youngest children gave responses such as the following: “No, because God is in the sky, and the master is in the vineyard.” “The master doesn’t look like God.” “God has a long white coat, but the master, he has pants.” “If he [the master] had a beard, he would be an image of God. But the beard must be white and very long up to the belly.” Level 2: Concrete-Moral Individuals at this level understood the parables as fiction with a message. However, the message was about simple, moral “truths” such as “people have to work,” rather than about theological concepts such as the kingdom of God. Furthermore, the subjects showed a beginning capacity to draw analogies between the parables and their own understanding and use of religious terms. For example, one ten-year-old said that the master of the vineyard is an image of God “because we say God is the master too.“ Level 3: Symbolic-Analogical. Only persons at this level fully appreciated the function of parables. Spontaneously, they treated the stories as fiction, containing a deep meaning about religious concepts that could not be said as effectively in another way. Furthermore, persons at this level saw many, often complex analogies that mapped characters and events to religious beliefs. For example. one individual saw the parable of the talents as meaning the following: “By the talents, 1 think that means really the love. God gives it to us, and we have to augment it.” Two judges scored the protocols using a description system that elaborates on the three levels (Bucher, 1990). The coefficient of interrater reliability was .89. Results of statistical analyses supported the expected age trend as well as the expected correspondence between Oser and Gmunder’s stages of religious judgment and the levels of understanding outlined above. Interpretations and Religious Judgment. The results so far stay close to Goldman’s findings. However, the protocols provided much more to analyze. Specifically, the protocols revealed a number of different ways in which the parables were interpreted. The question was whether these interpretations reflected individuals’ stages of religious judgment (thinking) as measured by Oser and Gmunder’s (1988) scheme. It was assumed that stage of religious judgment, not age, would be the primary determinant of how parables were interpreted, as evidenced by an isomorphism between the form of thinking characteristic of a given stage and the form of thinking in a given interpretation. (None of the subjects in the sample functioned at Stage 5 , so in the following discussion I report findings for Stages 1-4 only.) Those scoring at about Stage 1 for religious judgment interpreted the laborers parable as a warning that we should not be envious and should not zy zyxw zy 104 zyxwvut zyxwvutsr zyxwvu zyxwv RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT IN CHIDHOODAND ADOl~xma complain. Most of this group was made up of the younger children. But one twenty-five-year-old woman at Stage 1 responded to the question of what the story meant as follows: “That we shouldn’t be envious because the master will be angry, likewise God, he will punish us [if we are envious].” Here, then, the parable has been assimilated to her Stage 1 understanding of the God-person relationship. The master and God are both seen as powerful, even vengeful, authorities demanding obedience and good behavior. Subjects at about Stage 2 did not view the laborers parable as reflecting anything about the true nature of God. For example, an eleven-year-old girl, when asked whether and why the master of the vineyard could be an image of God, answered, “That‘s impossible because God is just. If someone works the whole day, he [God] gives fifty francs. If someone works only one hour, he gives much less; he gives exady five francs.” The interviewer then confronted her with a common theological interpretation by saying, “But there are some people who say that God is kind, that he gives more than he needs to give, that he acts just like the master. What do you think?” She replied, “That’s wrong, because God is just.’’ The emphasis here, then, is on the humanlike and reciprocal nature of the God-person relationship, as expected from Stage 2 thinking. In Stage 3, the focus shifts from God to persons; the emphasis is on individual responsibility, on the belief that fate is in our hands. Subjects at this stage reflected this emphasis in their interpretation of the laborers parable. These subjects saw the act of becoming a laborer as analogous to joining the Church. The parable’s meaning to them lay in the observation that it is never too late for us to change, or as one subject said when asked about the parable’s meaning, “that we can change our life, whenever we like. It is of no consequence whether it be the morning, that is, in our youth, or the evening, that is, in our old age. The most imponant thing is that one really wants to change.” In Stage 4, the focus is again on God and his nature, will, and actions, but without the anthropomorphisms of the first two stages. Stage 4 subjects interpreted the parable as analogous to God’s kindness, which does not follow usual standards for when and how to be kind. These subjects saw in the parable the message that God wants the best for people, especially the poor and sinful. The rich wage given to the latecomers was appreciated as a convincing image of God’s grace. For example, one fifty-year-old woman saw in the master’s repeated search for new laborers an image of God‘s persistence and effort to help. Furthermore, she remembered that in her childhood she had considered the master unjust, and later as quite different from God. Only after becoming a mother did she begin to interpret the parable in the way she reported to the interviewer. She thus gave vivid proof of the supposition that listeners or readers of parables interpret meaning through the filter of their respective stages of religious judgment. Similar results were found when analyzing interpretations of the para- UNDERSTANDING PARABLES zyx zy 105 zyxwv ble of the talents. The following types of interpretations corresponded with the expected levels of religious judgmenc Type 1: The parable warns against punishment. Type 2: The parable teaches that God rewards the industrious and punishes the lazy. Trpe 3: The parable invites the listenerheader to be responsible and active and to avoid bringing trouble upon oneself, as happened with the third servant. Trpe 4: The parable is rejected out of the belief that God does not reward and punish like the master. Conclusion This pilot study, then, provides empirical evidence that biblical parables are interpreted through the lens of one's stage of religious judgment, as described by Oser and Gmunder. Obviously, this conclusion does not contradict the findings of Goldman. Rather, it supplements the Piagetian explanations by providing a closer look at how interpretations are fashioned. Two final points are worth mentioning. First, we can assume that what is said here about parables applies to the development of understanding and interpretation of Scripture in general. It would be odd, indeed, if we used our stage of religious judgment to interpret parables but then used different thought structures to interpret psalms, homilies, and so on. Second, the evidence here supports an old, but often-forgotten idea that theology or the wisdom of mature religious thinking cannot be passed on directly to new generations. Wisdom, whether or not "religious," comes after years of active interpretation and reinterpretation. Religious educators, then, need to be patient, empathic, and tolerant when confronted with the immature theology of the young. zyxwvu References Bucher, A A Gleichnisvmtiindnisscvmtchen lerncn. Strukturgcnetischc Untmuchungcn mr Rezcpcion synoptischcr Parnbcln [Learning to understand parables: Structural research on reception of synoptic parables]. Fribourg: Universidtsverlag. 1990. Goldman, R Religious Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. New York Seabury, 1964. Oser, F. K., and Gmunder. F! (eds.). Der Mensch-Stujen seiner religiiisen Enhvicklung [Stages of human religious development: A developmental approach]. Gutersloh, Germany: Gerd Mohn, 1988. Anton A. Bucher is assistant professor at the Pedagogical Institute, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland