N.T. Wright gives some convincing evidence that the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, when interpreted in light of its 1st century context, has nothing to do with the post mortem state at all. I'm not sure that his view represents the final word on the matter, but I am substantially in agreement with his main points. The following is taken from Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God:
"The story carries clear echoes of well-known folk tales, to which Jesus is giving a fresh and startling twist. The emphasis falls at the same point that was made twice - i.e., with great stress - in the prodigal son: 'resurrection', i.e. 'return from exile', is happening all around, and the Pharisees cannot see it.
"The parable is not, as often supposed, a description of the afterlife, warning people to be sure of their ultimate destination. If that were its point, it would not be a parable: a story about someone getting lost in London would not be a parable if addressed to people attempting to find their way through that city without a map. We have perhaps been misled, not for the first time, by the too-ready assumption, in the teeth of the evidence, that Jesus 'must really' have been primarily concerned to teach people 'how to go to heaven after death'. The reality is uncomfortably different.
"The welcome of Lazarus by Abraham evokes the welcome of the prodigal by the father, and with much the same point. The heavenly reality, in which the poor and outcast would be welcomed into Abraham's bosom (as everyone would know from the folk-tale), was coming true in flesh and blood as Jesus welcomed the outcasts, just as the father's welcome to the returning son was a story about what Jesus was actually doing then and there. The theme of 'rich and poor', not unimportant in Luke, is here thrown into stark prominence, as recent studies have stressed. But the point of this, when the story is seen as a traditional tale with a new ending, was not so much what would happen to both in the end, nor yet simply a statement on the abstract 'ethical' issue of wealth and poverty, but rather what was happening to both rich and poor in the present time. Jesus' welcome of the poor and outcast was a sign that the real return from exile, the new age, the 'resurrection', was coming into being; and if the new age was dawning, those who wanted to belong to it would (as in Deuteronomy and Jeremiah) have to repent. The story points up the true significance of what Jesus was doing, and the urgent need of those who were at present grumbling to recognize this significance. The five brothers at home correspond quite closely to the older brother in the prodigal son. 'Resurrection' is happening, but they cannot see it. The story takes for granted that the poor and outcast were rightly being welcomed into the kingdom, and it turns the spotlight on to the rich, the Pharisees, the grumblers: they, too, now needed to repent if they were to inherit the new day that would shortly dawn. They were refused the extra revelation of someone ongoing to them from the dead; the message of repentance was clear enough in Moses and the prophets.
"The parable is therefore further strong evidence that 'repentance', in the senses already discussed, formed a central element in Jesus' proclamation. The basic story he was telling invited his hearers to see themselves as the true Israel, returning at last from exile, and turning back to their god as an essential part of the process."
Although I have not reproduced Wright's rich footnotes, one interesting point from the footnotes is that "scholars who presuppose the real referent of the parable to be the future post mortem state (e.g. Nolland 1993, 827) tend to reject the importance of the known [folk] story - despite the wealth of evidence discussed by Hock and Bauckham, to look no further."
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I skimmed with interest N.T Wright´s thoughts about the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Very interesting!
ReplyDeleteThe first book about Orthodoxy I ever read, before Kallistos Ware, dealt---in the very first chapter---with this parable, seeking to explain it in ¨the simplest possible way.¨ The book was Life After Death by a scholar in Greece, also a Bishop, named Hierotheos Vlachos. An excerpt from the book is reproduced on the website pelagia.org, or more directly at: http://www.pelagia.org/htm/b24.en.life_after_death.01.htm
Although accepting the post-mortem-state hypotheses, he acknowledges that the parable also contains a social dimension which he has not time to delve. What I found interesting about Vlachos´s exegesis was the distinction between hades and hell. ¨As we see, the parable is not about life after the Second Coming of Christ, but about the life of the soul between a person's death, when his soul leaves his body, and the Second Coming of Christ.¨
Vlachos says that we see here the rich man in Hades, not hell, an intermediate place before the second coming, in which he had a foretaste of the second coming but could not participate in it. This ¨great gulf¨ is a subjective state, he continues, contrasting it with purgitory. Later in the book the debates between the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox at the ¨ecumenical¨ Council of Florence in the 14th century, in which these subjects were debated, is reviewed and partially reproduced.
Hades has no ontological existence, though, according to Vlachos. ¨Light has two properties, illuminating and caustic. If one person has good vision, he benefits from the illuminating property of the sun, the light, and he enjoys the whole creation. But if another person is deprived of his eye, if he is without sight, then he feels the caustic property of light. This will be so in the future life too, as well as in the life of the soul after it leaves the body. God will also love the sinners, but they will be unable to perceive this love as light. They will perceive it as fire, since they will not have a spiritual eye and spiritual vision.¨
I find it very interesting that the idea just put forth by Bishop Vlachos in his commentary on The Rich Man and Lazarus is not that far removed from many protestant universalisms, including that of George Macdonald (see The Princess and the Curdie and The Day Boy and the Night Girl, for example), although not called universalism by Vlachos. But it was also this book Life After Death which, ironically, woke me up to the reality of hell and it contains a polemic against the doctrine of the restoration of all things.
Although this may not represent the final word either---, if there were more communication among the various Bishops we might have it figured out sooner rather than later, the importance of which seems to be at the heart of this parable.
Patrick Phillips