99 - Jesus' Parables and the War of Myths: Essays on Imagination in Scripture

Jesus' Parables and the War of Myths:
Essays on Imagination in Scripture
by Amos N. Wilder
Edited, with a Preface, by James Breech
Philadelphia, Fortress, 1982. 168 pp. $13.95.

The well known Hollis Professor of Divinity, Emeritus, at Harvard has made many important contributions to biblical scholarship. He has enhanced our understanding of the rhetoric of the New Testament (Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel, 1971) and the role of the imagination (Theopoelic: Theology and the Religious Imagination, 1976).

In this present volume, we are given seven essays which Wilder published from 1959 to 1974 on the parables and the symbolics of Jesus. Of the seven, only the first apparently is being published for the first time. The rest have been published previously by Wilder in journals and books. The volume also includes a lengthy preface in which Wilder briefly discusses his early theological development and his assessment of the current state of biblical hermeneutics.

The essays are grouped around two main themes: the first three deal with the parables of Jesus and the last four examine the symbolics of Jesus' speech and the question of the interpretation of New Testament eschatology. As one would expect from Wilder, each of these essays yields a rich lode of exegetical and theological insight. The essays are not, however, easy reading, and many may find them obscure and technical.

Because these essays were not originally published as a single piece or argument, it may not be clear what holds them together except for the repetition of some similar themes. In the first essay, "The World - Story: The Biblical Version," Wilder tries to establish a context for the interpretation of the following six essays. The thesis is that in Hebrew narrative "an earthy kind of realism came to birth such that its recitals encompass and interweave the whole story of heaven and earth and of man in unique fashion." What is perhaps unique about Israel's "epiphanies" is that they "required historization." Israel's narratives are "holistic" and provide the reader with a sense of orientation and coherence. Furthermore, only biblical narrative touches "the deeper enigma of man," the secret that "he is a mixture of freedom and helplessness, of loneliness and entanglement" and, paradoxically, that he is responsible for his lot. It is in this context that Wilder argues that Jesus' parables are epiphanic disclosures or extended metaphors.

In the last four essays, Wilder examines not just the symbolism or images used by Jesus, but what he describes as Jesus' symbolics, "the social - psychological dimension of the symbol and the whole domain of cultural dynamics." His point is that a mythopoetic reading of the New

100 - Jesus' Parables and the War of Myths: Essays on Imagination in Scripture

Testament requires that attention be given to eschatology, for New Testament myth is shaped by eschatological consciousness. In Christian Scripture, Wilder believes that the reader encounters eschatological myths which both address the situation of the loss of roots and at the same time point to conflict with established social authority. It is this "conflict" which represents "the war of myths" in the New Testament.

These essays demand much from their reader, but they also deliver a wealth of provocative ideas about the function of language in Scripture.

George W. Stroup
Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Austin, Texas