The Prodigal God
Hardcover | Paperback | Audiobook
Book Reviews aim to provide succinct, thoughtful summaries of books I have read. They contain quotes from the book, thoughts from others, and also some thoughts of my own. Typically they will be structured in the following order: author, introduction, message and purpose, remarkable chapter, and conclusion. This review will cover The Prodigal God, a book using one of the best-known Christian parables to reveal an unexpected message of hope and salvation.
Author
Tim Keller
Introduction
In The Prodigal God, Keller utilizes his trademark intellectual approach to uncover the essential message of Jesus, locked inside his most familiar parable. Within that parable, Jesus reveals God's prodigal grace toward both the irreligious and the moralistic. The Prodigal God challenges both the devout and skeptic to see Christianity in an entirely new way.
Message and Purpose
The purpose of The Prodigal God is to lay out the essentials of the Christian message, the gospel. Keller does so by dividing the book into seven chapters:
Chapter One: The People Around Jesus
Chapter Two: The Two Lost Sons
Chapter Three: Redefining Sin
Chapter Four: Redefining Lostness
Chapter Five: The True Elder Brother
Chapter Six: Redefining Hope
Chapter Seven: The Feast of the Father
In the introduction, Keller shares the parable from the Bible in its exact verse-by-verse context and builds his case from there. By explaining what message is typically derived from the parable, Keller embarks upon an alternative message that reveals an even deeper underlying message.
Remarkable Chapter
Always the most challenging portion of book reviews, I wrestled with which chapter to specifically highlight. That said, the final chapter entitled The Feast of the Father particularly resonated with me. In this chapter, Keller ties together the loose ends and brings the full message to completion. He explains there are four ways that our lives will be shaped by the gospel message: experiential, material, individual, and communal.
Salvation is experiential:
"Jesus secures the legal verdict 'not guilty' for us so we are no longer liable for our wrongdoings. However, salvation is not only objective and legal but also subjective and experiential. The Bible insists on using sensory language about salvation. It calls us to 'taste and see' that the Lord is good, not only to agree and believe it."
Salvation is material:
"In Matthew 25, Jesus describes Judgment Day. Many will stand there and call him 'Lord,' but Jesus says, stunningly, that if they had not been serving the hungry, the refugee, the sick, and the prisoner, then they hadn't been serving him (Matthew 25:34-40). This is no contradiction to what we have heard from Jesus in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. He is not saying that only the social workers get into heaven. Rather, he is saying that the inevitable sign that you know you are a sinner saved by sheer, costly grace is a sensitive social conscience and a life poured out in deeds of service to the poor."
Salvation is individual:
"In the end, Martin Luther's old formula still sums things up nicely: 'We are saved by faith alone [not our works], but not by faith that remains alone.' Nothing we do can merit God's grace and favor, we can only believe that he has given it to us in Jesus Christ and receive it by faith. But if we truly believe and trust in the one who sacrificially served us, it changes us into people who sacrificially serve God and our neighbors. If we say 'I believe in Jesus' but it doesn't affect the way we live, the answer is not that now we need to add hard work to our faith so much as that we haven't truly understood or believed in Jesus at all."
Salvation is communal:
"Christians commonly say they want a relationship with Jesus, that they want to 'get to know Jesus better.' You will never be able to do that by yourself. You must be deeply involved in the church, in Christian community, with strong relationships of love and accountability. Only if you are part of a community of believers seeking to resemble, serve, and love Jesus will you ever get to know him and grow into his likeness."
Conclusion
The Prodigal God can serve as an introduction to the Christian faith for those who are unfamiliar with its teachings or who may have been away from them for some time. In many cases, however, many lifelong Christian believers feel they understand the basics of the Christian faith quite well and don't think they need a primer. Or as Keller puts it, "one of the signs that you may not grasp the unique, radical nature of the gospel is that you are certain that you do." The Prodigal God would be a wonderful resource for each of the aforementioned groups and is one I would greatly recommend.