The Future as the Source of Being

Being and Refusal: The Elder Brother’s Eschatological Crisis in Luke 15:11–32

An Orthodox Reading Through Zizioulas, Heidegger, and Levinas

This paper offers a systematic re-reading of the Parable of the Prodigal Son that places classical patristic exegesis in dialogue with contemporary Orthodox ontology and continental phenomenology. While recent scholarship (Bailey, Keller, Nouwen) has recovered the elder brother’s centrality as addressee, existing readings continue to interpret his crisis primarily as moral failure or psychological dysfunction. I argue, instead, that Luke 15:25–32 dramatizes a profound ontological choice between modes of being—a distinction articulated through John Zizioulas’s eschatological ontology of communion.

The parable presents two competing modes of existence: being-as-reputation (the elder son’s closed, merit-based, past-determined identity) and being-as-communion (the father’s open, gift-based, eschatologically-oriented reality). The elder son stands outside the feast—which Zizioulas would recognize as standing outside truth itself, since ‘communion is the only way for truth to exist as life.’ This ontological reading transforms our understanding of the parable’s unresolved conclusion.

To develop this thesis, the paper brings three hermeneutical resources into conversation. First, Martin Heidegger’s existential analytic clarifies how the elder son embodies inauthentic existence through identification with das Man (social conformity) and existence defined by the finished past. Second, Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenology of the face illuminates why the parable devotes extended attention to the younger son’s suffering—not merely as narrative exposition but as ethical pedagogy revealing the vulnerable Other to whom we are answerable. Third, Zizioulas’s theology of personhood and communion provides the specifically Orthodox framework for understanding the crisis as a choice between participation in communion or self-exclusion from it.

The paper also addresses a methodological question relevant to contemporary Orthodox hermeneutics: the distinction between dogmatic and exegetical authority. While patristic readings of Scripture possess enduring spiritual and pastoral significance, they also reflect particular historical contexts and interpretive priorities. Chrysostom’s celebrated homily, though pastorally brilliant for fourth-century catechumens, emphasizes the younger son’s repentance and divine mercy while giving less attention to the parable’s confrontational address to the self-righteous. To extend the patristic reading while addressing dimensions less emphasized in earlier interpretation is not to reject tradition but to continue its interpretive and eschatological dynamism.

The parable’s open ending—the reader never learns whether the elder son entered the feast—functions as a liturgical and existential summons. Following Zizioulas’s understanding of liturgical time as the site where eschatology becomes a mode of existence, I argue that the parable remains unfinished because the reader’s response remains pending. Each liturgical assembly re-enacts this drama whenever sinners approach the table. The question persists: will the righteous welcome them, or remain outside?

This reading demonstrates that close attention to narrative structure, phenomenological analysis, and systematic engagement with Orthodox eschatological ontology can yield fresh exegetical insight while remaining deeply rooted in tradition. It contributes to contemporary Orthodox biblical hermeneutics by modeling how dogmatic fidelity and exegetical development can coexist.

John Zizioulas’s ontology of personhood inseparably relates personal being to relation (schesis), communion, and otherness, while his Trinitarian ontology places particular emphasis on the monarchy of the Father as the cause (aitia) of the personal existence of the Son and the Holy Spirit. This paper explores the anthropological implications of this principle, focusing on the role that a concrete human other may play in the realization of personal identity.

The question becomes particularly acute in light of Zizioulas’s statement that, ‘Ontologically, persons are givers and recipients of personal identity.’ What precisely does such ‘giving’ mean at the anthropological level? Does the human other become in some sense constitutive of my personal identity, or should a stricter distinction be maintained between the causation of personal being and its mutual affirmation within communion?

This paper explores the latter possibility. If the human person receives true hypostatic identity in Christ through participation in his filial relation to the Father, human persons need not be understood as sources of one another’s personal being. Rather, in communion they freely receive and affirm one another in their irreducible uniqueness.

This distinction also has existential consequences. If the other becomes a source of my identity, the other may become a condition—and even a burden—of my existence, paradoxically in the name of love itself. Understanding human communion instead as mutual affirmation rather than interpersonal causation may help preserve some of Zizioulas’s most radical theological insights: the monarchy of the Father, the freedom of the person, and the possibility of receiving the other precisely as other.