Luise Schottroff

Having surveyed Hultgren and Rohrbaugh’s perspectives in our two previous posts, we now turn to feminist scholar Luise Schottroff’s interpretation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son found within The Parables of Jesus. In this work Schottroff embeds her feminist critique of oppression and patriarchy within the interpretive hermeneutic of the socio-historical method.[1] She employs the socio-historical method with the understood purpose of explaining the details of the text and providing a foundation from which to understand the social function of that text.[2] For Schottroff, parables cannot be understood as allegorical accounts with purely metaphoric meanings and interpretations.[3] Rather, she argues that parables should be understood as a contextually situated literary form that presumes a response by those who hear the narrative and gives rise to a resulting action.[4] Simply put, even with our modern reading of parable narratives “a response is always part of a parable” in Schottroff’s reading.[5] Schottroff also displays a strong critical awareness of several hermeneutical assumptions within New Testament interpretation that she argues need to be critical analyzed and rejected in our modern context, including the assumption of Christian superiority over other religions, dualisms in theological construction, assumptions that provide the foundation for notions of guilt, sin, and suffering through violence, and the common Christian perception of the ‘duty’ to maintain the social status quo and its structures of power.[6] Further, Schottroff emphasizes the importance of rediscovering the Gospel of the Poor within the words and parables of Jesus and rejecting any and all reasons for ignoring or interpreting the words of Jesus that concern domination and poverty other than the proclamation of the Gospel of the Poor.[7] As Schottroff embeds her methodological framework with both a feminist awareness as well as socio-historical methodology, she pays a great of attention to the context of those who would have first been exposed to the literary parables of Jesus, especially their socio-religious context with regard to Torah and their eschatological expectations concerning not the coming kingdom of God, but regarding the ‘nearness’ of God speaking now.[8] To sum Schottroff’s methodological focus, we see that she writes as one critically aware of the traditional socio-historical method, as one fully embedded in the feminist critiques of traditional patriarchal interpretations and methodology, and additionally gives special care to a renewed eschatological understanding that emphasizes the action that results from the delivery of the parable. Continue reading →