[Please do not read part 2 without reading part 1 first!]

When reviewing the book The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith (New York: Dutton, 2008), I will seek to interact with some of the main points as presented by the author, Timothy Keller. Of course, there are many good points in the book, but I like to track with the author’s core ideas, not my own. I suppose I shall go through the book’s key thoughts by chapter.

In the introduction, besides simply introducing the contents of the book, Keller seeks to justify his use of “prodigal” in the title of the book. Of course, he quotes the definition “recklessly spendthrift” from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (pp.  xiv-xv). Perhaps with some mental gymnastics, we could apply this definition to the grace and love of God, but Keller ignores that words are both denotation and connotation. The word “prodigal” has a negative connotation, so is not really properly used of God.

Chapter one is entitled “The People Around Jesus.” Keller rightly identifies the dual audience of Luke 15 as the sinners and the hypocrites, and then he identifies the dual audience with the younger and elder brothers respectively. The main point of this chapter is near the end. Keller says, “The crucial point is that, in general, religiously observant people were offended by Jesus, but those estranged from religious and moral observance were intrigued and attracted to him” (pp. 14-15). He also says, “Jesus’s teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day.”

Keller’s assessment of Jesus’s audience is a popular one. I have fallen prey to the same ideas myself. However, these ideas are flawed in a couple of ways. First, Keller ignores some very real categories of people in the gospels. The people could not be placed into two simple, extreme buckets of Pharisees and terrible sinners. There were regular Jews who were not that bad and not that great. There were Jews like Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Joseph, Simeon, Anna, and more who were sincerely God-fearing and religious.

Second, Keller’s statements imply that Jesus was attracting large numbers from the dregs of society. However, it is hard to imagine that the 5,000 Jesus fed were majority prostitutes and tax collectors. Jesus’ first disciples were regular Galilean Jews from among the disciples of John the Baptist. Jesus considered Nathanael to be a true Israelite “in whom there is no deceit” (John 1:47). Peter is the disciple we know the most about. Peter claimed, “I have never eaten anything impure and ritually unclean” (Acts 10:14). Certainly, Peter may have struggled with hypocrisy at times (Galatians 2:11-14), but he seems to have been a sincere, law-abiding Jew who was looking forward to coming of the Messiah (John 1:40-42).

It seems much more reasonable that Jesus did not attract large numbers of sinful outcasts. It is true that Jesus did attract them, but we more often see him going to them than they coming to him. Certainly, Jesus loved and sought lost sinners, and certainly many lost sinners become his followers. It’s important to remember that Jesus often produced a different reaction than instant affection. As Peter said in Luke 5:8, “Go away from me, because I’m a sinful man, Lord!”

Keller applies his misreading of Jesus’ audience to the church. On pages 15-16, he says: “The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren’t appealing to younger brothers, they must be more full of elder brothers than we’d like to think.”

At first, this paragraph hits with great rhetorical punch. Any Spirit-filled, gospel-believing, Bible-reading Christian will be acutely aware of the dangers of hypocrisy. In fact, most Christians I have met will readily admit that they are hypocrites at some level. Of course, non-Christians are also quick to accuse Christians of hypocrisy, so this paragraph plays like an easy applause line with Christians and non-Christians alike.

Unfortunately, there are multiple problems with what Keller says. First, as someone else has pointed out to me, the parable does not teach that elder brothers prevent younger brothers from coming to the Father. The parable shows the younger brother did not think about the elder brother at all. He came home to speak to the Father.

In my experience churches really are full of younger brothers, just not the younger brothers at the beginning of the story. At the beginning of the story, the younger brother runs away from home. He does not come home to rejoin the family until he repents. After his return, we would assume he is no longer a prodigal. He is a changed man.

I would deny that the church mostly attracts “conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people.” Such people have a tendency to think they do not need the church. They are good enough already. Churches attract people who recognize their guilt before God and their need of God. As these people learn and grow, they become more like Christ, which can often appear on the outside as becoming more morally conservative and conscientious. Isn’t that what God would want? Isn’t that the emphasis of verse 10 of Ephesians 2:8-10, as further described in Ephesians 4:20-5:21?

Of course, as believers hang around in the church for a while, the temptation is to become more and more like the elder brother in the parable, and it is important to caution believers against that temptation. However, I do not believe that Christians are as hypocritical as the world says they are. For one thing, almost every human being, Christian or not, is plagued by a sense of self-righteousness and an attitude of superiority leading to judgmentalism. That’s human nature. What we see in the church are people who teach an ethic higher than what they themselves live out. In a sense, that is hypocrisy, but really that is all that we can do. We will never be perfect this side of heaven, but we need to hold up a perfect Christ as our example for living. We will always fall short of our own standards. Most Christians I know are quick to acknowledge the gap between their talk and their walk. Does that sound like the elder brother? It doesn’t to me.

The second chapter is a retelling of the parable, so there is little objectionable in it. In fact, it is one of the better chapters in the book. A couple of times, Keller falls prey to the error of letting his speculation run away with him. For example, he theorizes that the father’s wealth “would have primarily been in real estate, and to get one-third of his net worth he would have to sell a great deal of his land holdings” (p. 19). There is no evidence in the text to support this assertion. According to Old Testament law, a Jew’s real estate holdings were determined by tribe, clan, and family, and real estate could never be bought or sold in perpetuity. There is some evidence that, in the time of Jesus, the Old Testament real estate laws were not being followed correctly, but the world of the parable is not a precise correspondence to reality. All we know of the father’s wealth is that he had hired servants, an expensive robe, a ring, sandals, a fattened calf, and at least one goat. No real estate is mentioned at all.

The key part of chapter two is the last two sentences on page 28, where Keller says he is summarizing the message of the parable. He says, “In short, Jesus is redefining everything we thought we knew about connecting to God. He is redefining sin, what it means to be lost, and what it means to be saved.” We need to take notice of these statements, as Keller is outlining the contents of his book.

A couple of things trouble me about these sentences. First, of course, it is always a little scary when a theologian starts talking about redefining key concepts like sin and salvation. I am not sure we need to be redefining these concepts much at all. Second, who is the “we” to whom Keller refers? Certainly, Jesus was seeking to correct the Pharisees’ understanding of sin and salvation, but from what Keller says in chapter one, he is including the whole church in the category of the Pharisees. Therefore, Keller indicates that we all misunderstand sin and salvation. I think Keller is largely mistaken.

In chapter three, Keller begins to explain the main points of his understanding of the parable. On page 29, he says, “Jesus uses the younger and elder brothers to portray the two basic ways people try to find happiness and fulfillment: the way of moral conformity and the way of self-discovery. Each acts as a lens coloring how you see all of life, or as a paradigm shaping your understanding of everything. Each is a way of finding personal significance and worth, of addressing the ills of the world, and of determining right from wrong.” To Keller, these are different temperaments or personalities.

Keller may be offering an astute insight into the makeup of contemporary culture. Possibly, he could make a case that we could draw out some implications from two brothers of the parable – implications that could be applied to the contemporary culture by making certain connections. However, Keller does not present his thoughts in these ways. He states that “moral conformity” and “self-discovery” are what Jesus is portraying by the two brothers.

The problem is that this explanation of the two brothers is simply not correct. In fact, Keller seems to contradict ideas in his own book. He himself realizes that the elder brother represents the Pharisees and scribes of Luke 15:2, and the younger brother represents the tax collectors and sinners of Luke 15:1. Therefore, the elder brother represents self-righteous, judgmental, legalistic hypocrisy, and the younger brother represents rebellious, amoral hedonism. There may be some overlap between this explanation and Keller’s explanation, but the right explanation is so clear from the context, there is no need to merely “overlap.” Keller should just state the correct explanation.

Partially because Keller misunderstands the nature of the two brothers, he misunderstands the parable’s depiction of sin and righteousness. As he says on pages 36-37, “This means that you can rebel against God and be alienated from him either by breaking his rules or by keeping them diligently. It’s a shocking message: Careful obedience to God’s law may serve as a strategy for rebelling against God.”

There is some truth in what Keller says, but in order to score rhetorical points, he states his ideas in a dangerously misleading fashion. Certainly, the Pharisees thought they were meticulous law-keepers. The elder brother thought he had never disobeyed his father (Luke 15:29). However, it is obvious that both the Pharisees and the elder brother had disobeyed the law of God. That was one of Jesus’ main criticisms of the Pharisees in the gospels (e.g., Mark 7:9; Matthew 23), and in the parable we can see the elder brother clearly sins in multiple ways. He violates the fifth commandment by dishonoring his father. He violates the tenth commandment by coveting what his younger brother has. He is clearly guilty of pride – one of the sins God most hates. The elder brother’s problem is not that he keeps the law too well, but that he miserably fails to keep it at all. The elder brother is not righteous. He is self-righteous. This is an important distinction that Keller fails to make clear throughout the book.

As a result, Keller obscures the biblical concept of sin. He tries to avoid a false dichotomy by the following: “Most people think of sin as failing to keep God’s rules of conduct, but while not less than that, Jesus’s definition of sin goes beyond that” (p. 37). However, he then goes on to restate the same idea as virtually a false dichotomy: “Here, then, is Jesus’s radical redefinition of what is wrong with us. Nearly everyone defines sin as breaking a list of rules. Jesus, though, shows us that a man who has violated virtually nothing on the list of moral misbehaviors can be every bit as spiritually lost as the most profligate, immoral person. Why? Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life” (p. 43).

Again, there is much truth in what Keller says, especially in the last sentence quoted above. However, the idea that the elder brother “violated virtually nothing on the list of moral misbehaviors” is extremely misleading. Keller is incorrectly portraying sin. As we have already seen, the elder brother most definitely did break the rules. The Bible (and Jesus in particular!) describes sin as a heart condition that always makes itself manifest in outward behavior. This is why the Bible is perfectly comfortable to sometimes define sin as a violation of “the rules” (see James 2:10). A good heart will do what is right, and a bad heart will do what is wrong. The elder brother’s sinful acts are making manifest the sin in his heart.

Keller also misportrays a key concept of the gospel itself. I think the Bible clearly teaches that if (and it’s a BIG “if”) someone could keep all of God’s rules perfectly all the time without ever sinning in the slightest, that person would be saved. But the Bible also clearly teaches that the only person who could ever accomplish that prodigious feat was Jesus himself – which is why he can be the perfect sacrifice and impute his righteousness to us. The problem is not the law. The problem is the sin in our hearts (Romans 7:7-25). Therefore, keeping God’s law diligently is, in a sense, the exact opposite of rebelling against God. As we attempt it, though, we are led astray by our own sinful hearts.

Another dangerous concept in chapter three is the following: “Elder brothers obey God to get things. They don’t obey God to get God – in order to resemble him, love him, know him, and delight him” (pp. 42-43). Here is a typical Keller false dichotomy. Of course, it is not ideal for someone to serve God only out of selfish motives. The example of Simon Magus from Acts 8 comes to mind. However, the Bible everywhere teaches that rewards and blessings await those love and serve God. Such promises are often given as a part of an invitation to follow Christ. Paul clearly served God and endured great hardships in the hope of reaping great eternal rewards. Jesus himself obeyed the Father in the hope of reward (Hebrews 12:2). I could easily do a separate blog post about this topic, but the Bible nowhere draws a distinction between serving God for rewards and serving God for the sake of God himself. The two motivations are not contradictory. In the New Testament, the distinction is made between seeking earthly reward and heavenly reward, but there are indications that there are great blessings to be enjoyed even in this life – though the world might not value those blessings as highly as we would.

Here Keller is misunderstanding the parable itself, and he even somewhat contradicts ideas that are in other parts of his book. The father in the parable does not withhold blessings from the elder brother. In fact, the father both invites the elder brother to a feast and implies that the elder brother could have been enjoying the blessings of the father’s generosity the entire time (Luke 15:31). The problem is not that the elder brother was only seeking the joys of his father’s wealth; the problem was that the elder brother was missing out on the joys of his father’s wealth altogether. The younger brother was willing to become a hired hand, but was welcomed as a son. The elder brother had been welcomed as a son, but was choosing to slave away as a hired hand. This is one of the main contrasts of the parable, and Keller obfuscates it.

In chapter three, Keller also gives a very postmodern description of sin. On page 44, he says, “Jesus does not divide the world into moral ‘good guys’ and immoral ‘bad guys.’ He shows us that everyone is dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others in order to get power and control for themselves. We are just going about it in different ways.” There are many times when Jesus literally divides the world into good and bad. Of course, without him we all end up on the bad side of that division. I do not think the Bible anywhere teaches that “everyone is dedicated to a project of self-salvation.” I think this is a severe underestimation of the corrupting power of sin. To follow Keller’s penchant for literary allusions, think of Satan in Paradise Lost or the character of Faust. Think of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Human beings are perfectly willing to sell their souls for short-term pleasure or gain. That is the nature of sin. A legalist is often engaged in a project of self-salvation, but a hedonist often isn’t. Keller’s words fail to properly represent Scripture or the world.

Keller’s final sentence of chapter three gives me a little chuckle: “No one had ever taught anything like this before” (p. 47). The fact is that many of Keller’s ideas in chapter three do not resonate with Scripture – even with the words of Jesus. They are the creations of Keller, the culture, and pop Christian ideas. On the other hand, there is a lot of truth in what Keller says. Those true ideas are nothing new to Jesus. In the Old Testament law, God taught the need to circumcise the heart (Deuteronomy 10:16). David understood that what God was really looking for was heartfelt repentance (Psalm 51:16-17). By the time Jesus came, the Old Testament had already taught that God disapproved of empty legalism and profligate hedonism. What God was looking for was heartfelt faith and obedience. These were not new ideas. It was just that the Pharisees had not fully grasped them.

Chapter four is one of the better chapters in the book. Keller finally begins to describe the elder brother more in line with the text – as a proud, self-righteous, slavish legalist. As such, the elder brother is just as lost as the younger brother. One of the main issues in the chapter is that Keller too strongly separates dutiful obedience from love for God and others. As was understood in Jesus’ day, love for God and love for one’s neighbor were both clearly commanded in the Old Testament law (Luke 10:25-28). You cannot properly obey God’s law without loving God and your neighbor. The elder brother’s problem was that he completely failed to dutifully obey the most important principles of the law. That is why the elder brother was “lost.” He had neglected the “more important matters of the law” (Matthew 23:23). Therefore, Jesus has not really “redefined lostness” at all. He is merely pointing out lostness where the Pharisees were trying to hide it.

Keller uses the elder brother in the parable to lay the smack down on the contemporary church. Much of what he says is very good, but again, I think that these are easy applause lines. So many people agree with his assessment that it is hard to know whom he is trying to persuade. He says, “Everybody knows the Christian gospel calls us away from the licentiousness of younger brotherness, but few realize that it also condemns moralistic elder brotherness” (p. 67). I am not sure who these “few” are. I have met unchurched people who think Christianity is all about keeping rules. I have met some fringe fundamentalist “Christians” who make Christianity all about legalism and some liberal Christians who make Christianity all about being nice. But most gospel-believing, Bible-preaching churches that I know are VERY clear that legalism is wrong and that the gospel is about being saved by grace through faith.

Keller offers anecdotal evidence from his own pastoral experience on pages 68-69. He says that the “younger brothers” he encounters have been turned off by the “elder brotherness” of their home churches growing up. I have seen similar things myself. However, I am not as ready to accept the stories of the “younger brothers” at face value. In my experience, the home churches are often too harsh in their reactions and rebukes. On the other hand, in my experience, the “younger brothers” are really just overreacting to a combination of two things: being told their sins are sinful and being exposed to a simplistic, poorly-contextualized Christianity mixed with elements of past American culture. I have heard real horror stories of legalism and hypocrisy, and I am willing to condemn those churches along with Keller. However, I am not sure that the horror stories are the norm.

In chapter five, Keller finally gets to his positive message. Again, there is a lot of good in the chapter, but Keller repeats his incorrect understanding of the elder brother. On page 76, he reiterates, “He says, ‘I’ve never disobeyed you,’ and the father doesn’t contradict him, which is Jesus’s way of showing us that he is virtually faultless regarding the moral rules. So how does a person who is lost, yet who has no sins on the list, get saved?” As we have already covered, the elder brother had disobeyed. He was not faultless. He had committed sins on the list.

Then Keller goes on to misrepresent the gospel as a result: “It is only when you see the desire to be your own Savior and Lord – lying beneath both your sins and your moral goodness – that you are on the verge of understanding the gospel and becoming a Christian indeed” (p. 78). As we have already covered, a lot of sinners are not really seeking salvation in their sins, and elder brother legalism is not moral goodness. Thankfully, Keller’s next statement is perfectly fine: “When you realize that the antidote to being bad is not just being good, you are on the brink.”

On pages 82-84, Keller misunderstands some key details in the parable. Granted, it’s confusing. You can read Luke 15:12 as saying that the father distributes his estate to BOTH the younger brother AND the elder brother. However, the rest of the parable demonstrates that this is not the right way to understand what happened. The father is still in control of the remainder of the estate. It is he who orders the gifts to be given to the younger brother and the fattened calf to be slaughtered. His statement to the elder brother in Luke 15:31 makes clear that the elder brother’s inheritance is still in the hands of his father.

Keller says that the restoration of the younger brother costs the elder brother because all that is now given to the younger brother belongs to the elder brother. But this is not the case. It all still belongs to the father to distribute as he might choose. Of course, the elder brother may have seen it as stealing from his inheritance, but I am not sure that the parable really brings that out. But this is a heavy emphasis of Keller. He says, “The younger brother’s restoration was free to him [the father], but it came at enormous cost to the elder brother” (p. 84). The elder brother does not complain of losing his inheritance. He complains that the father has not given him anything.

Keller seems to think that the father is going to redivide the inheritance, so that the younger brother would receive a second inheritance. It is hard to come to that conclusion from the story. Maybe that is what would have happened, but it is pure speculation. All that the younger brother has received is a robe, a ring, some sandals, and a feast.

What’s going on is that Keller is trying really hard to shoehorn Jesus and the atonement into the parable. He says, “By putting a flawed elder brother in the story, Jesus is inviting us to imagine and yearn for a true one…There was no way for the younger brother to return to the family unless the older brother bore the cost himself. Our true elder brother paid our debt, on the cross, in our place” (pp. 84-85). I am thankful that Jesus paid the debt on the cross so that we can join God’s family, but that is not the point of the parable. Keller is inserting that idea into the parable.

The story is a parable. It has limitations. It does not cover all aspects of the gospel. There are important points it does not make. We do not need to make the parable say things it does not say. We need to let the parable speak for itself – saying only what it actually says. Just because Romans 8:29 describes Jesus as “the firstborn among many brothers,” it does not mean that we are supposed to see Jesus as the truer, greater elder brother missing from the parable. The parable can speak without it. On the other hand, Keller is making a clever bridge from the parable to the gospel. I see no problem with making the connection. What I have a problem with is Keller saying that the connection comes exegetically out of the parable. That is simply not the case and is an affront to Scripture.

In chapter six, Keller uses the younger brother’s desire for home as a launching point to wax eloquent on our own need and desire for “home.” His discussion is poignant and insightful. Again, though, he may be stretching it to draw all that out of the parable. Furthermore, he compares the feast at the end of the parable to the feast of heaven upon the return of Christ. This is an incorrect comparison. The two previous parables speak of a celebration that happens in heaven upon the repentance of a single lost sinner. The celebration is present, not future. The father says the elder brother could already be celebrating in the present.

In chapter seven, Keller tackles one of the intentional mysteries of the parable: what are the joys that the father indicates the elder brother has been missing out on? Keller seeks to describe what life could be like lived in the grace of God. Much of what Keller says in this final chapter is really good.

One of his most famous statements is in chapter seven: “The gospel is therefore not just the ABCs of the Christian life, but the A to Z of the Christian life. Our problems arise largely because we don’t continually return to the gospel to work it in and live it out” (p. 119). On the one hand, this statement is incredibly essential to understanding the New Testament and is often not fully understood by Christians. On the other hand, even Keller acknowledges that this idea was repeatedly proclaimed by Martin Luther 500 years ago (pp. 119,123). It was a core idea of the Reformation, and it was a core idea of passages such as Romans 6-8. It has been preached over and over in churches throughout the world for centuries. We can always use another reminder, but Keller’s statement is not as revolutionary as he himself portrays it.

At the end of the chapter, Keller returns to his faulty understanding of the two brothers by using Kierkegaard’s ideas of the “aesthetic” vs. the “ethical” (pp. 131-32). Again, these may be insightful categories providing helpful analysis of life. However, those categories are not helpful analysis of the two brothers in the parable. And this is one of the main themes of this review and one of the most common problems with Keller’s teaching and writing: he provides interesting insights and thoughts, but his insights and thoughts often do not come from the text.

I could say more about the book, but this will do for now. The real conclusion is that although Keller says many good things in the book, many of his main points are flawed and/or eisegetical. As final examples, let me offer a couple more quotes from the book. Keller says, “The point of the parable is that forgiveness always involves a price – someone has to pay” (p.85). This is not my malicious misreading of the book. This is what Keller says the point of the parable is.

I am sorry, but this is not the point of the parable. You can kind of read between the lines to ferret out some implications of the cost of forgiveness, but this is not THE point of the parable. The parable is about the celebration accompanying the return of the lost sinner. It is about the evil of self-righteous hypocritical judgmentalism. It is about the generous grace of the father in welcoming the return of his son, how that grace should drive us home to him, and how that grace should motivate us to imitate him with our own graciousness.

Keller’s statement of “the point” of the parable is in his chapter on Jesus as the true elder brother. I have argued above that the idea of Jesus being the true elder brother is not in the text. That idea is shoehorned into the text by Keller. What is incredible is that Keller himself admits it. At the end of chapter five, he introduces the idea of Jesus as the true elder brother in this way: “We will find the answer when we realize that Jesus deliberately left someone out of this parable. He did this so that we would look for him and, finding him, find our way home at last” (p. 72). So Keller himself admits that Jesus is not in the parable! And yet, he argues that Jesus’ absence from the parable is exactly the reason we should put him in the parable! This is one of the worst arguments from silence I have ever seen. With this style of argumentation, Keller can put anything he wants into any text he wants. He can simply say, “It has been deliberately left out, so that we will put it in.” This type of argument is impossible to prove and impossible to refute. It has only been allowed to stand because Keller has found an ingenious way to insert Jesus and the cross into the parable. It sounds so good it must be right, right?

Keller displays an astounding lack of understanding of how parables work. Many of Jesus’ parables do not have a Jesus figure in them. Think of the parable of the good Samaritan in Luke 10. Not only is Jesus missing from the parable, but the gospel of salvation by grace through faith is missing from the parable. The parable is simply an example of what neighbor-love looks like. Of course, the Samaritan bears some resemblance to Christ, since anyone who shows true love will resemble Christ. But that does not make the Samaritan a Christ-figure. Jesus is not the true and better Samaritan. It is incredibly biblically and theologically important that Jesus is a Jew, not a Samaritan! The Samaritan is a good man who is Christ-like in his character.

Think also of the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18:9-14. That parable shares many themes with the parable of the two sons. The tax collector is justified merely by begging God for mercy. There is no mention of Christ. There is no mention of atonement or of the cost of forgiveness. Parables are short, allegorical stories that serve to illustrate a narrow point or points. There is no need to claim they say more than they do or say something different than they do. We should let the parables speak for themselves. If need be, we can fill in after the fact with truths from other texts.

And here we see Keller’s big mistakes. He is so eager to apply the text to current cultural trends that he anachronistically reads his cultural observations back into the text. He should explain the text as it stands and then make application to our context. I think both his understanding of the text and his application would benefit. Furthermore, he is so eager to bring in Jesus and the atonement that he shoves them into a text that does not mention them, and he even admits that the text does not mention them! These mistakes of Keller are not in the background of his book. These mistakes are featured as his main points. These mistakes are what he puts forward as the central message of the text itself. For that reason, I do not recommend his book to others.