The Prodigal God
Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God an unusually good book. I think I could recommend it to almost anyone I know and be sure they would find gold on its pages. Keller essentially takes the parable of the prodigal son from Luke 15 and explains its implications for the world while walking the reader through the story. The parable is Jesus’ most famous, and is arguably the best short story ever told. So a book purely about this parable is risky, but Keller rises admirably to the challenge, producing a book which neither cheapens the parable nor reads more into it than is actually present.
Keller very swiftly makes a case to dump the received wisdom that says this parable is about the prodigal son. Coming at the end of series of parables about lost things (sheep, coin) he argues that this parable is about two lost sons. More than that, he says, it is about the Father who is “recklessly spendthrift” with his generosity towards them. The tearaway son may have squandered his father’s wealth, but the father himself is lavish with his love. Keller summarises, “Jesus is showing us the God of Great Expenditure, who is nothing if not prodigal towards us, his children”. The takeaway message is not just about the bad boy, but the very, very good God.
The argument Keller puts forward is that the two brothers in the story represent the two groups of people who came to hear Jesus’ teaching. We are familiar with the first kind; the wayward “sinners”. The parable is commonly preached on as if it is all about the “sinners” being freely welcomed by God. But Keller argues that it is actually addressed to the Pharisees and scribes: the “older brothers” from the parable. Far from making a name for themselves through their sin and distance from God, the Pharisees tried to make a name for themselves because of their religious acts. The parable was primarily addressed, therefore, to those who would be most offended by its message. As Keller explains, “through this parable Jesus challenges what nearly everyone has ever thought about God, sin, and salvation”.
Armed with this understanding, Keller proceeds to apply the parable, bit by bit, to the life of the church. He notes sombrely that our churches appear to be full of moralists, and therefore seem unapproachable to the outcasts of society. He suggests that the gospel we preach should attract outsiders and upset moralists. He shows that the respectable son, the older one, is as far from his father as his younger brother. The challenge is a strong one – our boundaries of what is acceptable before God are completely wrong. The parable ends with the father holding out an offer of reconciliation to the older brother, and we never learn whether or not he understands his father’s behaviour. The real conclusion, Keller argues, is whether we, the reader, will take it on board.
For me, the most striking chapter was “redefining lostness”, where the symptoms of living as an elder brother are brilliantly spelled out. It is a fantastic real-life explanation of what it looks like to grasp God’s grace. The Prodigal God, like a stick of rock, has the gospel running right through it. Keller’s great achievement in this book is to preach the same gospel to the outsider and the legalist with equal potency. The gospel is not just the start-point, but the end-point; in Keller’s analogy, not the ABCs but the A-Z of the Christian life.
This truly is a fantastic book. It is a short read (less than two hours should cover it) but it is absolute gold. There is encouragement and challenge on almost every page. I cannot think of a more effective book for explaining the universality of the gospel, and I eagerly commend it to anyone who has not read it. And once you have read it, you will probably want to do so again!
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Ali grew up in London, but is currently at university in the North East of England. He helped to re-launch Crossring in 2009, and has acted as Managing Editor of the website since then. He occasionally dabbles in photography and web development - he also designed and maintains the Crossring website.
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Good to see a review of this book. It’s in my ‘to read’ pile, I might fit it in sometime this summer.