copy pasting from my other post to save effort since I keep having the same objection brought up to me.
This image isn’t just a parable by itself. It’s also paired with a spoonfed interpretation and a question/answer quiz format (turn the page upside down to see the “correct” answer to our loaded question!).
the only reason any of us turns to God is because He gave us that grace. Some people have to live their whole lives without God’s Grace until the very end, but some of us have been given grace all our lives.
That is absolutely a veiled appeal to predestination. If your conversion to Christianity isn’t of your own free will, but rather because God ordained that you would receive His grace at some point in your life that He predetermined, then that is a form of predestination.
I don’t see how anyone could get Communism out of this either, since the point of the story isn’t the egalitarianism of some boss paying all workers the exact same amount of money regardless of how much they worked (which isn’t what Communism is anyway… bosses hiring people under Communism?! Even the most incomplete interpretation of Marxism shouldn’t lead to this.) but it’s a strained analogy for predestined religious conversion. The Boss hiring workers is God. The workers are souls. The day is the life of the soul. workers who get hired at the end of the day are “saved” at the end of their life by God’s grace. The workers hired at the beginning of the day are “saved” at the beginning of their life by God’s grace. The boss decides who gets saved by deciding who gets hired. The workers who don’t get hired at all are not saved by God’s grace and go to hell. This third part is left out of the story but it’s there by implication. After all, what is God saving us from? Eternal separation from God. i.e. Damnation. Which is hell.
I want to preface that I haven’t practiced catholicism or any kind of christianity since my teenage years, so i really have no horse in this race. That being said, it surprised me that this parable was being interepreted in the “Salvation is limited, and God has already decided who’s getting it, and those who are getting it are going to do much better in life” light, one that is (to me) a weird protestant/american phenomenon that i didn’t know existed until later in life.
I agree with you that there’s nothing communist/marxist about the parable, because it flies in the face of all material analysis, and as you said, it doesn’t fit with even a cursory knowledge of the LTV. The wages are salvation, which comes from an unlimited source, not material wealth. I’m not interested in painting Jesus as some kind of proto-communist or leftist icon, other people have approached the manner much better than I could, and liberation theology is a valid starting point to resisting oppression (in my view). But this parable has nothing to do with it.
I see where you’re coming from with your criticism of the implications of the parable, but tbh i don’t feel qualified to make theological judgements about it, I was just talking about what I learned growing up, and interpreting it as “salvation is universal, no matter if you jump on the bandwagon early or late”.
Thanks for your thoughtful post. I must confess I was wrong to characterize it as “Calvinist” as I did not realize it was from a catholic website, and I was knee-jerk calling it calvinist because it seemed to me to be supporting predestination (even if in a very subtle way).
No problem! Catholics, especially in the Global North have some weird protestant-like takes that go against doctrine, so it’s understandable some protestant work ethic may slip in, even in catechism.
(in my experience) Global South Catholics vary a lot based on their class character, which is why I support liberation theology as a basis for social movement so much.
copy pasting from my other post to save effort since I keep having the same objection brought up to me.
This image isn’t just a parable by itself. It’s also paired with a spoonfed interpretation and a question/answer quiz format (turn the page upside down to see the “correct” answer to our loaded question!).
That is absolutely a veiled appeal to predestination. If your conversion to Christianity isn’t of your own free will, but rather because God ordained that you would receive His grace at some point in your life that He predetermined, then that is a form of predestination.
I don’t see how anyone could get Communism out of this either, since the point of the story isn’t the egalitarianism of some boss paying all workers the exact same amount of money regardless of how much they worked (which isn’t what Communism is anyway… bosses hiring people under Communism?! Even the most incomplete interpretation of Marxism shouldn’t lead to this.) but it’s a strained analogy for predestined religious conversion. The Boss hiring workers is God. The workers are souls. The day is the life of the soul. workers who get hired at the end of the day are “saved” at the end of their life by God’s grace. The workers hired at the beginning of the day are “saved” at the beginning of their life by God’s grace. The boss decides who gets saved by deciding who gets hired. The workers who don’t get hired at all are not saved by God’s grace and go to hell. This third part is left out of the story but it’s there by implication. After all, what is God saving us from? Eternal separation from God. i.e. Damnation. Which is hell.
I want to preface that I haven’t practiced catholicism or any kind of christianity since my teenage years, so i really have no horse in this race. That being said, it surprised me that this parable was being interepreted in the “Salvation is limited, and God has already decided who’s getting it, and those who are getting it are going to do much better in life” light, one that is (to me) a weird protestant/american phenomenon that i didn’t know existed until later in life.
I agree with you that there’s nothing communist/marxist about the parable, because it flies in the face of all material analysis, and as you said, it doesn’t fit with even a cursory knowledge of the LTV. The wages are salvation, which comes from an unlimited source, not material wealth. I’m not interested in painting Jesus as some kind of proto-communist or leftist icon, other people have approached the manner much better than I could, and liberation theology is a valid starting point to resisting oppression (in my view). But this parable has nothing to do with it.
I see where you’re coming from with your criticism of the implications of the parable, but tbh i don’t feel qualified to make theological judgements about it, I was just talking about what I learned growing up, and interpreting it as “salvation is universal, no matter if you jump on the bandwagon early or late”.
Thanks for your thoughtful post. I must confess I was wrong to characterize it as “Calvinist” as I did not realize it was from a catholic website, and I was knee-jerk calling it calvinist because it seemed to me to be supporting predestination (even if in a very subtle way).
No problem! Catholics, especially in the Global North have some weird protestant-like takes that go against doctrine, so it’s understandable some protestant work ethic
may slip in, even in catechism.
(in my experience) Global South Catholics vary a lot based on their class character, which is why I support liberation theology as a basis for social movement so much.