Thread by @richbarcellos

Brief thoughts on interpreting parables:
1. Kline Snodgrass uses “Augustine’s interpretation of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37), in which virtually every item is given theological significance”

2. (Kline Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 4) as an example of the older method.

3. “the man is Adam; Jerusalem is the heavenly city; Jericho is the moon, which stands for our mortality; the robbers are the devil and his angels who strip the man of his immortality and beat him by persuading him to sin; the priest and levite are the priesthood and the ministry

4. of the OT; the good Samaritan is Christ; the binding of the wounds is the restraint of sin; the oil and the wine are the comfort of hope and the encouragement to work; the donkey is the incarnation; the inn is the church; the next day is after the resurrection of Christ;

5. the innkeeper is the Apostle Paul; and the two denarii are the two commandments of love or the promise of this life and that which is to come” (Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, 5).

6. Snodgrass replies quite confidently with these words: “With this we are not very close to Jesus’ intent!” (Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, 5).

7. Before being quick to dismiss Augustine’s method, it may cause (and should cause) restraint in us to know that Benjamin Keach, a seventeenth-century Particular Baptist, interpreted the details of this parable very similar to Augustine

8. (Benjamin Keach, Exposition of the Parables (1865, reprint; Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1991), I:304-05).

9. In fact, in terms of assigning meaning to the details of parables, we must account for the fact that our Lord does this very thing in the parables of the sower and the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13:18-23).

10. As Keach says, “[H]e opens every particular part, and applies it” (Keach, Exposition of the Parables, I:xi).