That interpretation is, with all possible respect to them both, silly. It ignores what the text actually says - which is a sure-fire way to make a complete dog’s breakfast of a text. It reads into the text something important to them, for which not a word in the passage gives the slightest support. Of course they find Purgatory in the passage - they read Purgatory into it. This is no argument for Purgatory - it’s an argument against it, because if the doctrine depends on bad exegesis (which it does not) then there is no reason to think the Bible supports it (even if it does so elsewhere, without the “benefit” of bad exegesis). The Church needs something better for its mission in the world than fourth-century fantasies about first-century texts. Even a legion of Saints, no matter how learned, authoritative, or brilliant, cannot make a wrong interpretation of a text into a right one; what things are, is more important than what they are considered to mean.
The text is not telling an allegory - it’s telling a parable. Parable & allegory are both extended metaphors, but they are no more the same thing than beef & ham are the same thing - belonging to the same class, is not the same as being identical. Allegory, if not controlled by some consistent intrinsic principle, can make any text mean anything whatever: a little ingenuity could easily make the text into an allegory about Superman (not the Uebermensch, but the Kryptonian in red tights) If belief in Superman were ever to become important to Christians, like as not he would be read into the Biblical text. Which is a back-to-front way to proceed. On Fundamentalist principles, nothing would be simpler: we would be told that Jesus, being all-knowing because He is God, knew about Superman, & wished to tell the disciples about Him. The protests of Biblical scholars would be brushed aside, as “unbelief”, “calling Jesus untrustworthy”, “lack of faith”, “disbelief in the supernatural”, “liberalism”. How is that any more distant from the meaning of that passage than the mistakes of those two Fathers ?
There may be an
analogy between the intercession of the Saints and the actions of friends of the unjust steward - it does not follow that the passage is about the intercession of the Saints. The meaning seen in the passage by those Fathers is applied to the Christians of their times & places - but Jesus was not talking about the Christians, or the beliefs, of the times in which those Fathers lived: He was talking to Jews who lived in His time & place. Jewish belief in the intercession of the righteous was in any case of rather dubious status - even the doctrine of a resurrection was less questionable.
This help can’t be received by Lex Luthor either, but does that mean the passage is about Superman or his enemies & exploits? It is simply wrong to see in the passage any position whatever about Catholic eschatology, if only because Jesus, a Jew speaking to Jews, was not a RC, & did not have a RC eschatology. RC eschatology can perfectly well be seen as a legitimate & God-assisted development of certain Jewish ideas - but that is a very different matter from the position that they were held, in developed RC form, by Jesus & or by the very first Christians. To think that, would be like supposing that because the USA today has 50 states, it has always had 50 states, & did not start with 13.
Sorry to be so critical
