I really never meant to work myself to death...

Okay, I thought about it, and even though it's long, I thought it would be a good idea to post my project proposal for my honors project up here. I'm probably going to be talking about it or at least referencing it lots this summer, since it's already consuming boatloads of my time, and you should be able to have at least some idea of what I'm doing if I plan to talk about it that much. Skimming is encouraged, it did take up three pages in MS word. I didn't post the five page bibliography, because that's just scary. Anyway, I hope this is somewhat interesting, and of course, if not you always have the option of averting your eyes. And stay tuned, I've got a couple of actual posts brewing in my head, I just haven't really had time to commit them to paper yet.

Shannon Callan
Honors Project Proposal
Advisor: Dr. Linda Mills Woolsey
Readers: Dr. Terence Paige, Dr. Marcus Dean, Prof. Lori Huth
"Word in Flesh: A Contextualization of Christ’s Parables for 21st Century Minds"

Perhaps one of the greatest questions facing the church in the West today is the question of relevancy. It often seems that there is a growing gap between the understandings, language and concepts that are common in churches and among Christians and the understandings of those concepts among the common person on the street. Also adding to the problem of this chasm is the growing biblical illiteracy of the average American or European today; many cannot even answer the most fundamental questions about the content or meaning of the Bible. This is an especially pressing crisis in the area of evangelism: if ordinary people cannot understand the words or concepts Christians use to communicate the gospel, how can we tell them the good news about Christ? One possible answer to this problem is the teaching form of the parable. It is well attested, especially in postmodern scholarship, that story-telling is a very effective way of teaching and communicating. But if those very parables that Christ used to show a picture of the Kingdom of God are in that same confusing language and drawing on those same concepts, how can they be of any more assistance? I believe that what is needed is, in a sense, a “translation” of these parables. In my project, my goal will be to decipher biblical parables into parables that contemporary, unchurched people can relate to and understand, yet are still faithful to the original intent as communicated in the biblical text.

I will attempt to do this with four parables from the gospels by putting them through a three stage process. This process will be interdisciplinary, drawing not only from the field of literature, but also from biblical and cultural study. In the first stage, I will use biblical and hermenutical tools to do exegesis on each of the passages to find out as clearly as possible what they meant in their original first century context. I will first do some introductory reading on the biblical parable form and Jesus’ use of it as well as some general reading on paradigms for parable scholarship. I will be looking in depth at each of the selected texts (listed in the outline) and also looking into the cultural background of the concepts that are alluded to which Jesus’ first listeners would have been intimately familiar with. With the information that I uncover, I will be writing a “mini-exegesis” paper for each of the parables of 5 double-spaced pages each.

In the next stage I will be looking at interpretation of the parables from the standpoint of liberation theology in a Latin American context. This will aid the final product in giving me a fresh perspective on the parables by stepping out of the traditional ways of interpretation and seeing how one culture has made these parables meaningful in their context. I will first be doing some introductory research to the process of contextualization of biblical and theological concepts and then doing some introductory reading to gain a better understanding of liberation theology and its growth in Latin America. I will then look specifically at Latin American liberation readings of the parables to gain greater understanding of their unique interpretive paradigm. The final product of this phase will be a research paper about 10 double-spaced pages in length.

The final phase of this project will be my creative response to my research in the form of fictional retellings of the four parables I have researched, set in the 21st century and using language and concepts that will be as familiar to my readers as the concepts that Jesus used would have been to his. This is where the “translation” work of my project will be done as I seek to find concepts in modern understanding that are comparable to the ones that Christ used. For this portion I will first do preliminary reading of other literary precedents in this kind of interaction with the biblical texts and then write drafts and revise to form final copies of my own parables.