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The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith | 
 enlarge | Author: Timothy Keller
Publisher: Dutton Adult
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $13.57
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Rating:  17 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 160
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0525950796
Dewey Decimal Number: 226.806
EAN: 9780525950790
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Product Description
Newsweek called renowned minister Timothy Keller a C. S. Lewis for the twenty-first century in a feature on his first book, The Reason for God. In that book, he offered a rational explanation of why we should believe in God. Now, in The Prodigal God, he uses one of the best-known Christian parables to reveal an unexpected message of hope and salvation.
Taking his trademark intellectual approach to understanding Christianity, Keller uncovers 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. This book will challenge both the devout and skeptics to see Christianity in a whole new way.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
Eye Opening Look at Luke 15 January 7, 2009
The Prodigal God is a short but powerful exposition of the major themes of Luke 15, centering particularly on the parable of the two sons. Keller, drawing his ideas from a sermon by Edmund Clowney which Keller says was "life-changing", writes of the two sons as two who were pictures of the two types of people in the crowd with Jesus on this occasion. On the one hand, the tax collectors and sinners were seen in the younger son, who sought self-salvation through self-discovery and experience. Then there were the Pharisees, who sought self-salvation through moralism just like the older son. The case of the younger son is resolved in the parable. He repents and is brought back into the family. But the older son's story is left open-ended, which Keller says is an indication that Jesus was targeting the Pharisees with this story, urging them through his open ending to think through the implications of this story.
This book would be especially helpful, I think, to committed church members. It is easy for a person who is faithful in church life to become accustomed to thinking of themselves as deserving of God's favor and to think of themselves as better than those outside the church. Keller issues in the Prodigal God a wake-up call to people who are seeking, knowingly or unknowingly, to be made right with God through their religious activity.
Prodigal Grace of God January 2, 2009
Excellent book. Small enough to read in one evening. After I finished my wife read it without setting it down. She said is was the best book she ever read. For her it made clear some of the things we personally have dealt with in our family and community. The older brother in the parable is the main focus and that which in today's churches seem to get a free pass. Highly recommended! In my opinion Keller's theology is sound and the book is easily read and understood by those without a degree in theology or religious studies yet he does not dumb down the message of the gospel. A powerful little book on the parable of the two lost sons. It is now making the rounds to all who will read it.
Correct diagnosis on a major problem with the church. January 2, 2009
Timothy Keller, in relating the story of the two sons, unintentionally (?) addresses another issue altogether. Many books have been written recently about the decline of the church in North America. Churches are filled with elder-brother types who have never been transformed into the likeness of Christ. All of their "good works" are done in the church, but the rest of their lives are no different from that of their secular neighbors. Church becomes nothing more than a good old boys' club where "sinners" are not welcome. As a result, people become disillusioned with the church and either leave it altogether or keep shopping around in hopes of finding something better. Many emerging churches are trying to find solutions to this problem and books abound on the different theories of how to fix the ailing church.
Keller's book is the first one I've read that correctly diagnoses the problem. He says, "Jesus' teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most 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."
The fault lies more with the message than with its hearers. So what is wrong with the message? Keller gives us a clue in chapter 3 on redefining sin. Many churches today focus almost entirely on God's mercy and grace and love and hospitality. But as Keller so adroitly points out, "the prerequisite for receiving the grace of God is to know you need it." We in the church have a tendency to give out the offer of grace before there is any evidence of repentance. We fail to preach about sin and the coming wrath of God on the sinner who refuses to repent. We forget that anybody who has graduated from a public school in America in the last forty years has been indoctrinated in the prevailing cultural worldview that teaches that man is basically good. So we end up with a church full of people who think they are pretty good and don't have a clue how desperate they really are--a church full of elder brothers.
Keller hits the nail right on the head when he points out that there is an order in which things must be taught. He says we need to assume that the elder brothers are just as lost as the younger brothers, which means we must start from the beginning with them. Jesus preached repentance and used the law of Moses to show people how hopeless it was to try and keep the law. We need more of the same kind of preaching. Rather than getting on the fad-wagon of the emerging churches that are devising new ways to "do church," we need to get back to the ancient message as Keller suggests in The Prodigal God.
The Prodigal God: A must read! Excellent! December 26, 2008
This short volume (139 pages) is about, as the subtitle says, Recovering t he Heart of the Christian Faith.
It's a look at the parable of the Two Lost Brothers and their Prodigal Father, commonly called The Parable of The Prodigal Son.
Both sons were lost, with the older son in a more dangerous lost position than his younger brother (please read the book to see why!)
Once Keller has developed the younger brother-type and the older brother-type, they both "portray the two basic ways people try to find happiness and fulfillment: the way of moral conformity and the way of self- discovery" (p. 29).
But I way to believe that most visitors and contributors to this blog are like the True Brother Keller presents as the alternative to the younger brothers and the elder brothers.
P.S.
Do yourself a favor and read this book as quickly as you possibly can. It will make you smile and cry at the same time.
Prodigal God Review from Greenleafblog.net December 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I wouldn't say that this book radically changes my view of the gospel, I have been on a journey of discovering the true gospel for a few years now, and I assume that this journey will continue my entire life. However, The Prodigal God, Tim Keller's latest, definitely sharpens my view of the gospel.
Keller clearly gets at the heart of the Christian faith using Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son, or as Keller calls it, the Story of Two Lost Sons. Keller chooses to aim much of his attention towards the "elder brother," who is equally as lost and unworthy of the father's love as the openly rebellious younger brother. The younger brother and the older brother are archetypes that Jesus uses to point out the route to spiritual fulfillment taken by all people. They either follow the quest for fulfillment in personal discovery and the pursuit of passions or they follow the road of moralism and duty. Neither is the answer, according to Christ, and both are worthy of the wrath and disinheritance of the father, yet the gospel is that the father goes to each one and initiates restoration.
Keller describes why each son, and why everyone who seeks happiness through either spiritual path, is lost. He writes, "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." The younger brother sought to find salvation for himself through seeking external pleasure and satisfaction through self-discovery. The older brother sought to find salvation through personal morality and effort. He was was angry because he felt he was owed the inheritance of the father. When the father invited the younger brother back into the family it came at great cost to the older brother, a cost he was not willing to pay since he felt he has earned his inheritance. The older brother attitude, to Keller, is more dangerous than that of the younger since the younger knows he is lost, while the older thinks he is saved by his own merits.
One of the most important contributions of Keller's book is the idea of the "True Elder Brother." Keller notes that commentators and teachers of this parable often say that the forgiveness of the father was free and use it as an offer of free grace to all who would believe. While the grace was free to the younger brother, it was costly indeed to the older brother. All that remained of the fathers wealth rightfully remained to him, so it was at his expense that the younger brother was brought back into the family. Keller writes that although the older brother resented this, Jesus point in telling the parable was to point to the "True Elder Brother," himself. Jesus is the older brother who paid the price for the inheritance of sinners. That is a truly beautiful picture of the gospel.
This is a short (133 pages) and easy to understand book. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the Christian faith, to new believers and to long-time Christians who think they have the gospel figured out. It would be equally beneficial at clarifying the heart of Christianity for all three parties.
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