We are al guilty at one time or another of deriving an unintended application from a biblical text. Here is an example that comes from David Barton, who is popularly known as Pastor to the Tea Party. It is based on the Parable of the Laborers in the Field (Matthew 20:1-15)
Barton states that “Jesus was anti-union and against the minimum wage. The parable teaches that an employer has the right to make individual agreements with his workers without any outside interference.”
Several comments are in order:
1. The nature of parables is to use an earthly story to teach a spiritual lesson, not an economic one.
2. This is demonstrated by Jesus' own explanation at the end of the story. Parables are particularly difficult to explain in the absence of a context, and we ignore Jesus' own interpretation at our peril.
3. Barton makes the mistake of trying to import today's economic and political systems into an entirely different culture of 2,000 years ago.
4. If you applied this same reasoning to the Parable of the Unjust Judge and the Widow, it would teach that Jesus supported the courts totally ignoring the rights of the poor unless absolutely forced to do so. Also, you could equally argue that the Parable of the Dishonest Steward shows that Jesus applauds those who defraud their employer as long as they can get away with it.
5. Finally, since one denarius, the amount of money each worker got, was the bare minimum to support a man and his family for one day, this parable actually teaches that there should be a minimum wage. But even this would be importing into the text a teaching that wasn't intended.
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