The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith

A feast engages the senses. John 2 describes Jesus’s first miracle: turning water into wine. This saved a wedding party from humiliation, but Keller suggests that it also shows Jesus’s purpose of bringing joy. Salvation is not just about having one’s sins pardoned; it is a subjective experience, as evidenced by biblical passages describing the experience of God’s goodness in terms of taste and sight. Similarly, Jonathan Edwards compared simply knowing God’s grace intellectually to knowing that honey is sweet without ever actually tasting it. Through the Holy Spirit, Jesus’s love becomes tangible, and this experience frees the individual from fear and assures them of God’s providence. Though this “foretaste” fluctuates in strength across individuals and life periods, it is a real experience of the Father.

Eating is physical, and the various biblical references to it, such as Jesus’s post-resurrection meals, signal the importance of the material world. God called creation “good,” and Jesus’s resurrection and the promised new earth affirm this. Redemption is not simply about individual souls but about the fate of the world itself—the “end of disease, poverty, injustice, violence, suffering, and death” on earth rather than in some spiritual realm (124). This is why the Bible depicts history ending with a feast, in contrast to philosophies (e.g., Platonism) that devalue the physical world. Jesus’s attention to illness and hunger in his ministry reflects the importance of the body. 

Recognizing this, Keller argues, produces a social conscience. Jesus’s miracles hinted at the way a world without sin would look, so Christians can and should work for both spiritual salvation and social justice. Where religions that emphasize the transience or triviality of the material world might encourage social apathy, Christianity does the opposite, showing God entering the world to fight suffering.

A meal nourishes individuals. This is true of the Eucharist, which is the vehicle for spiritual growth, but it is also how the gospel broadly should be understood: as something to internalize and draw strength from. 

Keller once again distinguishes between religion, which preaches redemption through obedience, and Christianity, where obedience flows from redemption. However, Martin Luther taught that humanity’s instinct is toward religion; to truly grow as a Christian, one must therefore constantly return to the gospel, “digesting it and making it part of [oneself]” (130). For example, generosity flows from understanding Christ’s poverty for humanity’s sake, while stronger marriages come from understanding Jesus’s sacrificial love. Broadly, a deepening grasp of Christ’s salvation “restructures our motivations, our self-understanding, our identity, and our view of the world” (133). The incentive for good living becomes love, not fear of punishment. 

Keller recounts an exchange with a woman who called the idea of grace “good scary”: Asked to elaborate, she explained that the idea of salvation by works implicitly gives one “rights,” whereas salvation by costly grace means God can ask anything of the individual. This understanding sidesteps the problem of what theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”—the idea that, because God’s grace is infinite, one can do whatever one wants. The solution is focusing on salvation’s infinite cost. Luther made a similar point, arguing that faith alone saves, faith that “remains alone.” A life unchanged by belief in Jesus reveals that one does not really believe in Jesus in a meaningful sense.

Feasting involves other people, and inviting someone to eat is typically an offer of friendship. However, modern Western culture prizes individualism, leading many to seek spirituality without organized religion. While Keller again acknowledges that many have had bad experiences with churches, he suggests that writing off organized religion altogether is no solution; in fact, avoiding community is “just another form of self-righteousness” (140). Moreover, spiritual growth is necessarily communal. In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis reflected on losing a friend, realizing that different friends reveal unique aspects of one another. We can’t fully know someone in isolation. Lewis concluded that something similar is true of knowing God, and Keller echoes this, arguing that people come to resemble Jesus only through “relationships of love and accountability” within a church (143).

Keller reiterates that the Parable of the Prodigal Son shows that moral conformity and self-discovery are both “dead ends” and that redemption is possible only through Jesus. Isak Dinesen’s story “Babette’s Feast” teaches a similar lesson. In a bleak village, two sisters flirt with the idea of leaving to pursue a life of pleasure but ultimately end up leading their late father’s strict, joyless religious sect. They take in a refugee, Babette, who wins the lottery and prepares a gourmet feast. During the “exquisite” meal, people open up, old enemies reconcile, and a guest realizes that morality and joy can coincide. This latter observation, like the feast itself, points to an alternative to both moralism and hedonism, though the story doesn’t fully define it. Jesus, however, does: He is the alternative to the paths of both brothers, and following him “will bring us finally to the ultimate party and feast at the end of history” (148), which believers can foretaste now. Keller concludes by quoting Isaiah 25:6-8, which speaks of this feast.