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Financial and economic language pervade the teachings, images, and metaphors found in the New Testament and deployed in Christian theology. While much scholarly attention has been paid to language and teachings about wealth and poverty, there has been much less work done to examine the ways that financial and economic language have provided structure for the teachings, images, and theological concepts that we find in biblical texts. I am interested in tracing the ways that money, wages, and labor lend their logic to the structuring of the parables, while also examining the ways that the parables repay by offering sacred substantiation to particular economic systems and practices.
This dissertation analyzes three of the parables found in the Gospel of Matthew – the parable of the day laborers (Matthew 20:1-16); the parable of the tenant farmers (Matthew 21:33–46); and the parable of the slaves entrusted with money (Matthew 25:14-30) – in order to examine both how financial systems informed the creation of the parables and their attendant theological implications as well as how the parables then functioned historically to support those same systems. Throughout each chapter, I employ what I have termed a hermeneutics of account/ability in reading each parable that is situated within the contemporary economic context of 21st century U.S. global capitalism. This approach provides a way of reading that actively resists structures of exploitation.
My hermeneutic purposefully centers the laborers in the parables and asks critical questions about how labor is constructed and valued in the texts. It also pays attention to the ways that meaning-making happens and the ways that elite economic interests compound throughout the reception history of the texts. As I analyze each parable, I employ three theo-economic interventions: centering the laborers in the parables as a way of focusing on how labor is constructed, valued (or not valued), and made to do theological work; inefficiency as an intentional strategy for reading parables and multiplying meanings; and a hermeneutics of account/ability that examines whose economic interests are served by particular interpretations of texts.
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