Parable of the four soils

“And he was teaching them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: ‘Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow.’”

— Mark 4:2-3 (ESV)

The parable of the four soils, also called the parable of the sower, is Jesus’s story of a farmer whose seed falls on four kinds of ground, a path, rocky ground, thorns, and good soil, with only the last bearing fruit (Matt. 13:3-8; Mark 4:3-8; Luke 8:5-8). Jesus interpreted it for his disciples: the seed is the word of the kingdom, and each soil pictures a different response to it. Told amid the religious leaders’ and his own family’s rejection of him, the parable locates that rejection in the hearer’s own heart, not in the sower or the seed.

Biblical Basis

All three Synoptic Gospels record the parable in nearly identical form, followed by Jesus’s own interpretation of it to his disciples (Matt. 13:1-9, 18-23; Mark 4:1-9, 13-20; Luke 8:4-8, 11-15). A sower scatters seed that falls on a hard-packed path, where birds eat it before it can sprout; on rocky ground, where it springs up quickly but withers under the sun for lack of root; among thorns, which grow up and choke it; and on good soil, which yields a crop thirty, sixty, or a hundred times what was sown (Matt. 13:3-8). Jesus interprets each soil as a distinct response to “the word of the kingdom”: the path is the hearer who does not understand it, and the devil snatches it away before it can take hold; the rocky ground is the hearer who “receives the word with joy” but has no root, so that he “falls away” as soon as tribulation or persecution comes; the thorny ground is the hearer choked by “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches,” who proves unfruitful; and the good soil is the one who hears and understands, and bears fruit (Matt. 13:18-23).

Nineteenth-century biblical scholar Elijah Porter Barrows treated this parable as a clear case where “all the parts are essential” to its meaning, since “the four different kinds of soil represent four different classes of hearers,” unlike a parable such as the ten virgins, where only the single point Jesus himself states, watchfulness, carries interpretive weight and the surrounding details are mere narrative color.¹ The parable belongs to the same Matthew 13 discourse in which Jesus explains, when his disciples ask why he teaches this way at all, that parables both reveal the kingdom’s secret to those given ears to hear and leave it hidden from those outside, a purpose already treated in full at parables of Jesus.

Confessional Witness

The Canons of Dort cite this parable by name as Christ’s own teaching on why the gospel call, offered freely to all who hear it, meets with such different responses. Of those who reject it, the Canons state: “some of whom when called, regardless of their danger, reject the word of life; others, though they receive it, suffer it not to make a lasting impression on their heart; therefore, their joy, arising only from a temporary faith, soon vanishes, and they fall away; while others choke the seed of the word by perplexing cares, and the pleasures of this world, and produce no fruit. This our Savior teaches in the parable of the sower.”² The fault, the Canons insist, “lies in themselves,” not in the gospel, Christ, or God who calls them.² By contrast, those who do respond in saving faith owe it “wholly” to God rather than “the proper exercise of free will,” a view the Canons name directly as “the proud heresy of Pelagius”; God himself “opens the closed, and softens the hardened heart” of the elect and gives them new life “without our aid.”³

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states the same substance in its own chapter on effectual calling, without naming the parable itself: those God has predestined to life he calls “by his Word and Spirit… enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God; taking away their heart of stone and giving unto them a heart of flesh.”⁴ That doctrine, and its biblical grounding, is treated in full at effectual calling; here the parable functions as one of the texts standing behind it.

Doctrinal Significance

The parable locates the difference between the four outcomes in the condition of the soil rather than in any defect in the sower or the seed, and the Reformed confessional reading, per the Canons of Dort above, locates the good soil’s own receptivity in God’s prior work rather than in a natural advantage the soil already had. John Owen made the same point against Jacob Arminius’s claim “that it always remains in man’s power of free-will to reject grace”: God’s grace is not “such an operation… as should, as it were, violently overcome the will of man, and force him to obedience,” but “a sweet effectual working as doth infallibly promote our conversion, make us willing who before were unwilling.”⁵

The parable also warns against mistaking an impressive but temporary response for the real thing. Puritan theologian Thomas Goodwin traced a close parallel between the parable’s thorny-ground hearer and the apostasy warning of Hebrews 6:4-8, where those who fall away are described as having been “enlightened,” having “tasted the heavenly gift,” and having been “made partakers of the Holy Ghost.” Goodwin argued that such language describes a real but non-saving work of the Spirit, “the highest work of them that fall away,” genuinely elevated above ordinary unbelief yet specifically distinct from the saving work given to true believers.⁶

Historical Development

The parable’s doctrinal use develops across four centuries of Reformed reflection on the difference between temporary and saving faith.

Calvin and the doctrine of temporary faith

In the Institutes, John Calvin used the parable to argue against counting Judas’s reception of the Lord’s Supper as spiritually equivalent to Peter’s. The seed that fell among thorns, Calvin noted, “sprung up, but was afterwards choked,” which Christ intends to describe “the effect of a temporary faith,” a faith Calvin distinguished from the saving kind on the ground of the same parable: seed on the wayside and stony ground “neither took root,” so that “the hardness of believers is an obstacle which prevents Christ from reaching them.”⁷

The Synod of Dort, 1618-19

Confronting the Remonstrant claim that saving faith depends on the sinner’s own free cooperation with grace, the Synod of Dort formalized the parable’s reading given above: the differing responses to the gospel trace to the hearer’s own fault, while the one response that succeeds is owed entirely to God’s regenerating work, “not inferior in efficacy to creation, or the resurrection from the dead.”⁸

Thomas Goodwin on temporary workings of the Spirit

Writing later in the seventeenth century, English Puritan Thomas Goodwin developed the stony-ground and thorny-ground hearers into a fuller doctrine of the Spirit’s “temporary” operations, real workings short of regeneration that can produce, for a time, responses resembling true conversion.⁶ This extended Calvin’s own distinction between temporary and saving faith into a fuller account of what such counterfeit workings can look like.

Twentieth-century use against the Arminian apostasy argument

Reformed apologist Loraine Boettner turned to the stony-ground hearers of the parable to answer the Arminian argument that a true believer can lose salvation. Those who “give up” the faith, Boettner argued, “have no root in themselves… They are then said to have given up or to have made shipwreck of that faith which they never possessed except in appearance,” citing Peter’s description of such people returning “like a dog to his own vomit” (2 Pet. 2:22) and Christ’s own words to false professors, “I never knew you” (Matt. 7:23).⁹

Opposing Views

The Arminian reading locates the difference between the soils in each hearer’s own free response to a grace offered equally to all, rather than in God’s differential work on the soil itself. Arminius himself held, as John Owen summarized him in order to answer him, “that it always remains in man’s power of free-will to reject grace,” implying the corresponding power to receive it; on this reading, the sower’s seed and the offer it represents are the same for every hearer, and what distinguishes the good soil from the rest is the hearer’s own uncoerced choice to let it take root.⁵ The Canons of Dort reject this account of the good soil’s origin, naming a synergistic reading of conversion “the proud heresy of Pelagius.”³

Objections and Responses

If the good soil already differs from the others before the seed ever falls on it, doesn’t the parable make the outcome depend on the soil’s own prior condition rather than on God’s work? The Canons of Dort answer that the soil’s receptivity is itself God’s own doing, not a natural head start he discovers and rewards: God “opens the closed, and softens the hardened heart,” turning a heart that was “evil, disobedient and refractory” into one that is “good, obedient, and pliable.”¹⁰ Owen made the same point about the manner of that change: it is not violent coercion but a “sweet effectual working” that renders the previously unwilling willing.⁵

If the stony-ground hearer receives the word “with joy,” doesn’t his later falling away describe a real believer losing salvation, against the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints? Boettner’s answer, drawn from the parable’s own wording, is that the stony-ground hearer’s faith was never the saving kind to begin with: it is called “temporary faith” precisely because it “arises” from something other than the root that saving faith has, and its failure under trial shows what kind of faith it always was rather than a saving faith that was subsequently lost.⁹ The fuller case for that doctrine, including its biblical and confessional grounding, is treated at perseverance of the saints.

Related Doctrines

References

Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 561. ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Third and Fourth Heads of Doctrine, art. 9. ↩ ↩²
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Third and Fourth Heads of Doctrine, art. 10. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 10, “Of Effectual Calling,” para. 1. ↩
John Owen, A Display of Arminianism, in The Works of John Owen, vol. 10, 133, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “Exploring the Relationship Between Effectual Calling and Regeneration in the Reformed Ordo Salutis,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 464. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Thomas Goodwin, The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1863), 336. ↩ ↩²
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 17, sec. 33. ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Third and Fourth Heads of Doctrine, art. 12. ↩
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 142-143. ↩ ↩²
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Third and Fourth Heads of Doctrine, art. 11. ↩