Some Thoughts About Themes and Worldview
I was at the movies last night and an ad for the upcoming Bruce Springsteen movie was featured. The theme, Deliver Me from Nowhere. Now I wonder if we watched that movie without knowing the theme if we would conclude that was the theme. It’s not as easy as you may think. Worldview comes into play. Let’s illustrate.
Take a moment to read Luke 15:11–32 for yourself. You can find it here on BibleGateway. It's one of the most familiar stories in Scripture. A younger son demands his inheritance, leaves home, wastes it all on reckless living, and completely screws up his life. He ends up in misery. He finally returns to a father who is working in the field and sees his son afar off and runs to welcome him home.
We usually call it the parable of the prodigal son. But what if the real theme is bigger than we think?
In the 1980s, New Testament scholar Mark Allan Powell asked students from three different countries, the States, Russia, and Tanzania, to read the parable, set the Bible aside, and then retell the story from memory. What they remembered, and what they forgot, revealed something powerful.
Most of the American students completely left out a key detail. They forgot the line that says, “There was a severe famine in that country, and he began to be in need.” This wasn’t intentional. Many didn’t even realize they had skipped it. For them, the young man’s downfall was entirely due to his own bad choices. He blew his money. He ended up in the mud. It was a story of personal failure. That perspective reflects a culture that strongly values individual responsibility and self-reliance.
The Russian students almost always remembered the famine. In fact, many of them pointed to it as the turning point in the story. Coming from a country with painful memories of hunger under Soviet rule, they knew what famine meant. The son's suffering wasn’t just about reckless living. He was also caught in something bigger than himself — a disaster no one could control. In their telling, the story became a reminder that hardship is not always self-inflicted.
The Tanzanian students noticed something else. What stood out to them was the sentence, “No one gave him anything.” In their cultural context, where community support and mutual responsibility are deeply rooted, this was a shocking failure. The son was starving, and the people around him chose to do nothing. For them, the heart of the story was not just personal or political — it was social. The problem wasn’t just sin or famine. It was neglect. No one helped.
Three cultures. Three different emphases. One story.
Powell’s experiment reveals something important. The way we read a story often depends on where we come from. Our culture shapes what we see, what we remember, and what we believe matters most. That’s not always wrong, but it’s not the whole picture either.
The Americans emphasized personal responsibility. The Russians saw the weight of history and external crisis. The Tanzanians focused on the breakdown of community. Each view offers a truth, but none of them capture the full story by themselves.
So, what is the theme? Is it about a son who wasted his life? A famine that made everything worse? A society that failed to show compassion?
Yes. It is about all of that. The parable only makes sense when all the pieces are in place. The son made foolish choices. The famine struck. The people around him did nothing. His life unravelled through a mix of personal mistakes, unfortunate events, and social indifference. And at the end of all that mess, grace met him in the form of a father who ran toward him because this lossed son realised he had amends to make with God and his father. "I have sinned against heaven and against you, Father."
That’s the deeper message here. We often want a single, clean answer. But human stories, like this one, are more tangled than that. And God’s grace meets us in the middle of the tangle, not after we figure everything out.
This parable also reminds us to stay humble in how we read Scripture. We often assume we’re reading it “as it is,” when in fact we’re reading it through our own lens or the lens of the religion we were raised in. When I left my religion of thirty-three years, I read the scriptures afresh and was surprised how wrong my concept was. We highlight the parts that match our experience and quietly skip past what doesn’t. Like the students who forgot the famine, we may not even realize what we’ve left behind.
That’s why we need each other. We need to read with people who see things differently. Not just to broaden our understanding, but to correct it. When others point out what we missed, they’re not challenging the truth. They’re helping us see more of it.
So, what’s the theme? Maybe it’s that no single theme is enough. The power of this story is that it holds space for human failure, historical hardship, communal breakdown, and still ends with grace. The story is about ypu and I who need reconcilliation with God and those we have hurt.
And that’s exactly the kind of story we need.