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Tertullian's rigorous position appealed to some early Christians because it seemed to strengthen the church's resolve against sin, a resistance sorely needed in the Roman Empire. For many years the early church inhabited a wider world that viewed it with great suspicion as an upstart religion bent on undermining Roman society.

Others besides Tertullian agreed that the parable of the Prodigal Son didn't apply to Christians who turned apostate and then wished to return to the fold. The presbyter Novatian, while acknowledging that God had the power to forgive even Christians who lapsed in a time of persecution, insisted that those who had sinned in such a grave manner could not be readmitted to the church's fellowship. For Novatian, the church consisted of only the katharoi, the "pure." How could those who had tainted themselves with the sin of apostasy validly or safely rejoin Christ's spotless body?

Novatian's hardline position, though, was vigorously opposed by other church fathers, almost all of whom were pastors or bishops in the church. Ambrose, a leading bishop in Italy, argued that to deny people—Christians or non-Christians—the possibility of forgiveness, even for the gravest of sins, was to rob them of all hope. The Prodigal Son had found his way home by the path of repentance. Where would his repentance lead him if he could never go home again?

Jerome, a church father well known for his sandpaper personality, observed the context of the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke's gospel, commenting that if Christ welcomed "publicans and sinners," how could the church refuse them? The very rhythm of the Incarnation demanded that the church be a forgiving, welcoming community: "What clemency can be greater than that the Son of God should be born a son of man, that He should endure the tedium … of gestation, await the arrival of birth, be wrapped in swaddling clothes, become subject to His parents, grow through successive ages, and after the insulting words, blows, and scourging become for us accursed on the cross, in order to free us from the curse of the law, being made obedient to the Father, even to death?"

Jerome insists that God the Father's foreknowledge encompassed and envisioned the return of his wayward sons and daughters, a journey home illustrated by Jesus' parable and made possible by the Incarnation. "God with whom all future events are already past and who knows beforehand all that is to be, runs forward to his coming and by His Word, which took flesh by a virgin, anticipates the return of His younger son."

Augustine, a contemporary of Jerome, readily admits the returning son did not deserve his father's love. Has there ever been a repentant sinner that did? Augustine reasoned that the younger son's recognition of his unworthiness demonstrated his once proud heart had become humble, malleable before God's glory and purposes. "This unworthiness, this glory we do not deserve, the younger son acknowledges when forced to by his need. The younger son, I repeat, acknowledges this unworthiness when wandering far from his father's home … he acknowledges God's glory, but only when constrained by want. And because through that glory of God we have been made what we were not worthy to be, he says to his father: 'I am not worthy to be called your son.' Unhappy as he is, he obtains happiness through humility and shows himself worthy by the confession of his unworthiness."

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October 26 1998, Vol. 42, No. 12