JOS JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY

The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32) ranks among the most interpreted pericopes in the Christian scriptural tradition, yet its philosophical dimensions remain comparatively underexplored in African contextual biblical scholarship. Existing readings have tended to privilege soteriological and theological concerns while neglecting the parable’s capacity to sustain rigorous philosophical analysis of human freedom, existential crisis, and the conditions of genuine reconciliation. This article addresses that gap by bringing Søren Kierkegaard’s existential framework into sustained dialogue with the parable and with African Ubuntu communitarian ethics. Employing philosophically informed biblical hermeneutics as its primary method, the article conducts a close reading of Luke 15:11–32 through Kierkegaard’s threefold schema of aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages of existence, demonstrating that the younger son’s journey constitutes a philosophically coherent dramatisation of freedom's misuse, existential despair, and reconstituting grace. Ubuntu philosophy, with its relational account of personhood and communal understanding of reconciliation, is then brought into constructive dialogue with this reading, enriching and extending it by recovering the parable’s communal dimensions. The article concludes that genuine reconciliation, as the parable envisions it, requires both individual interior transformation and communal reincorporation, a convergence carrying significant implications for African hermeneutics, reconciliation praxis, and interdisciplinary theological scholarship.

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