A Cognitive Approach Towards The Inpterpretation Of Biblical 1 Parables

The interest in biblical parables (mainly in the New Testament) can be traced to Augustine of Hyppo (A.D. 354– 430). This North African Catholic bishop attempted to assign heavenly meanings to every single element in a parable. The allegorical interpretation of this kind had held sway over parable interpretation for about 1500 years until 1899 when Adolf Jülicher, a German scholar, published his Gleichnisreden Jesu. Jülicher differed from Augustine in that he read only one message into a parable, hence the"one-point approach". Ever since then, an eclectic approach has been the norm with different interpretative schools springing up to compete for the public's attention.Since parables are earthly stories with a heavenly meaning that show the agreements or correspondence between things natural and things spiritual, it is reasonable to regard parables as metaphors. Studying these parables as metaphors might help blaze a new trail in parable interpretation. With this understanding, efforts were made in this study first of all to review some relevant literature concerning the parables per se: their nature and how they have been interpreted over the centuries. Once parables were theoretically established as extended metaphors, the metaphor studies were reviewed and critiqued before the conceptual blending theory was decided upon as the theoretical tool to analyze a selected number of biblical parables. Then, to avoid the subjectivity of interpretation based on introspection, the same parables were put to test in an empirical research in the form of a questionnaire.A number of findings have emerged out of the efforts made so far. First, a cognitive approach in the tradition of Lakoff and Johnson (and George Fauconnier and Mark Turner) towards the highly metaphorical religious texts does provide some valuable insights. Jesus'parables can be understood as a projection of the intangible/abstract domain of the kingdom of heaven onto the tangible/concrete domain of earthly existence. Secondly, since human beings possess an innate and unconscious capability to construct and reconstruct meanings from their shared physical experience, it is quite possible for them to bring to bear their image-schemata of trivial things in the world in digging beneath the surface of religious texts for profound heavenly meanings. Lastly, our cognitive and psychological faculties are more or less similarly structured, yet the judgment and evaluation of each individual may be colored by their own unique experience of the world. This being the case, the procedure of parabolic projection and the subsequent blending becomes dynamic and open-ended rather than monolithic or bounded. In a similar vein, a cognitive dimension in the otherwise theological (and historical, cultural as well as literary) analysis of parables does not automatically exclude other approaches. Rather, they are complementary in improving the overall quality, depth and value of parable analysis.