lifeasmission

I had the good fortune of receiving an advance copy of Scot McKnight’s newest book, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible from Zondervan who asked me to post a review, which I am happy to do.

Scot begins with the following assumption:

Everyone of us adopts the Bible and (at the same time) adapts the Bible to our culture… Everyone picks and chooses.  I know this sounds out of the box and off the wall for many, but no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves otherwise, it’s true.  We pick and choose [what to adopt and how to adapt].

He then goes on to suggest that we do well to…

1. Approach the Bible as a story - “Until we learn to read the Bible as Story, we will not know how to get anything out of the Bible for daily living.”  (Sidenote, Scot could have said this better.  How it comes across is out of harmony with the larger scope of what he is trying to communicate.  This sentence by itself perpetuates approaching Scripture as a commodity - what can I get out of it for my daily life? - but this isn’t really what he means I don’t think.

2. (Re)Learn how to listen as we dwell in Scripture - “Our relationship to the God of the Bible is to listen to God so we can love him more deeply and love others more completely.  If God’s ultimate design for us is to love God and to love others, we can only acquire that love by learning to listen to God.”

3. Practice discernment - “The pattern of discernment is simply this: as we read the Bible and locate each item in its place in the Story, as we listen to God speak to us in our world through God’s ancient Word, we discern - through God’s Spirit and in the context of our community of faith - a pattern of how to live in our world.”

The final part of the book is an exercise in trying to follow this 3-pronged approach to Scripture by wresting with the issue of women in ministry.

Kudos to Scot for writing a book that makes much of the excellent work being done in biblical hermeneutics accessible and for providing a resource to those of us trying to help others embrace a missional paradigm of the church that pertains specifically to the place of Scripture within that paradigm.

As all college professors should be, Scot is clearly more concerned with the formation of people than the conveyance of information.  This aspect of his character bleeds through the pages of his book and, all by itself, should merit an audience for what he has to say about how we approach and use Scripture.

Perhaps my favorite line in the book, “… God designs all biblical study to be a ‘useful’ process that leads us to the Bible in such a way that it creates a person who loves God and loves others.”  I would want to tweak this only slightly to read, “… God designs all biblical study to be a ‘useful’ process that leads us to Jesus in such a way that it creates a people who love God and love others.”  But again, I think in the larger scope of what Scot is saying, this sentiment comes through.

It is just this sort of sentiment that I think holds great promise to help correct both those who elevate the Bible to an almost idolatrous level as well as those who would merely cast it off as impossibly relative or irrelevant.  More than this, Scot’s book can be helpful in freeing the Bible from the grip of Western individualism by helping readers to understand the primary role of Scripture as a centering text for a community.

If you value the Bible, and perhaps especially if you think you’re got a pretty good handle on the Bible, I’d highly recommend picking this book up when it comes out.