The Blue Parakeet
A week or so ago, I refreshed my google reader and noticed that Scot McKnight had posted on his blog that the publisher for his new book, The Blue Parakeet, was offering a free preview book to the first twenty people who sent an email to the publisher promising to read, review and blog the book. Quick on the draw, or just lucky, I was notified that if I would send them my address, Zondervan would send me the book. Friday’s mail brought a package from Zondervan containing said book.
Having just finished reading another recently released book, I dove in. And apart from the fact that the first chapter of the book fell out completely (bad binding at the printer), the book was a delight.
McKnight has taken on the role of the conservative post-christian, post-modern, emerging theologian. His blog, Jesus Creed, is a must read for anyone engaging the theological issues of contemporary Christianity. His book, Jesus Creed was a hit. Another of his books, Praying with the Church opened my eyes to the world of how the early church prayed and to the idea of prayer books and the daily office. His book A Community Called Atonement opened my eyes to the Perichoresis of the Trinity. This new book will challenge the most fundamental of theologians on how they read the scriptures.
Thesis
McKnight’s thesis is that none of us practice everything the Bible says. In fact, we pick and choose what we want to practice. But this results from more than just being fallen people. This results in us either ignoring or explaining away explicit commands in the scripture. For instance, Jesus commands us to wash other’s feet. Yet, I have never been in a church where that was practiced. We also don’t stone homosexuals, as ordered in Leviticus. Most churches don’t keep the Sabbath either. We explain these commands away or we ignore them completely.
And we do this because we have we have developed an inner logic to the picking and choosing. Most of us, however, don’t understand that logic. For McKnight, this is an important issue. How we live out the Bible is a pressing question for our day. Until we learn to do this, “we will be open to accusations of hypocrisy. (19)”
McKnight develops three ways we do this. The first is to read and retrieve. Here ,”we return to the times of the Bible in order to retrieve biblical ideas and practices for today.” There are two kinds of practices: retrieve it all and retrieving only what can be salvaged. The second way is to read through tradition. The singular problem here is traditionalism. Those who read the Bible this way see the traditional way of reading the Bible. It is incapable of renewal and adaptation. The third way is by reading with tradition. In doing this, people go back to the Bible so they can move forward through the church and speak God’s Word in their days and in their ways. McKnight promotes the latter option.
Accomplishing the latter option will find us understanding three words: Story, Listening, Discerning.
Story
McKnight believes that the Bible is a group of wiki-stories, which interpret the grand Story. The grand Story consists of five plots with five themes:
1. Creating Eikons (Gen 1-2) - Oneness
2. Cracked Eikons (Gen 3-11) - Otherness
3. Covenant Community (Gen 12-Malachi) - Otherness expands
4. Christ, the Perfect Eikon, redeems (Matt - Rev 20) - One in Christ
5. Consummation (Rev 21-22) - Perfectly One
Each author of each book of the Bible writes their story within this plot, but they are given freedom to tell the Story within their own way. Whatever book you read, you should read each book as a variation on this Story.
The Story is what brings unity to the Bible. The Story that God tells forms and frames that unity.
Listening
In this section, McKnight challenges the reader to consider this question: “What is my relationship to the Bible? (84)” He later states, “When I read my Bible, the words ‘authority’ and ‘submission’ don’t describe the dynamic I experience. It is not that I think these words are wrong, but I know there is far more to reading the Bible than submitting to authority. (85)” McKnight notes that what he learned about the authority approach to the Bible was that it is not personal enough or relational enough. It does not express enough of why it is that God gave us the Bible. Therefore, he argues for a relational approach to the Bible for five reasons:
1. The relational approach distinguishes God from the Bible. “God gave us this papered Bible to lead us to love his person. But the person and the paper are not the same thing. (87)”
2. The relational approach focuses the Bible as God’s written communication with us. The Bible is God’s communication with us in the form of words.
3. The relational approach invites us to listen to God (the person) speak in the Bible and to engage God as we listen.
4. We enter into the Bible’s own conversation and the conversation the church has had about the Bible.
5. Our relationship to the Bible is transformed into a relationship with the God who speaks to us in and through the Bible. “Our relationship to the Bible is actually a relationship with the God of the Bible. (91)”
I love what he says at the end of chapter 6:
So…if we frame our relationship to the Bible in terms of authority, we will inevitably have authoritarian issues emerging as theology. Here is a conclusion that has taken me nearly thirty years to come to: without denying the legitimacy of the various terms in the authority approach, those who have a proper relationship to the Bible never need to speak of the Bible as their authority nor do they speak of the submission to the Bible. They are so in tune with God, so in love with him, that the word “authority” is swallowed up in loving God. Even more, the word “submission” is engulfed in the disposition of listening to God speak through the Bible and in the practice of doing what God calls us to do. (93)
Discernment
The third section is where McKnight causes us to struggle with how to discern the scriptures. He says, “the early church has always taught that the times have changed and we have learned from New Testament patterns of discernment what to do and what not to do (118).” He goes on to state:
[S]o let me state them clearly: we don’t follow Jesus literally, we do pick and choose what we want to apply to our lives today, and I want to know what methods, ideas, and principles are at work among us for picking what we pick and choosing what we choose. Furthermore, it is my belief that we - the church - have always read the bible in a picking-and-choosing way. Somehow, someway we have formed patters of discernment that guide us. (122).
He then notes Jesus’ statement from Luke 11:1-4 concerning prayer. He shows how, despite Jesus’ words to recite the Lord’s prayer whenever we pray, our application moves away from the prayer to make it a model prayer. Other examples are listed as well.
Women’s place within the Church
The last section of the book is an application of all he has said concerning the role of women in the church. He find valid argumentation from the Trinity (the perichoretic idea of the Trinity), creation, the activities of women in both the Old and New Testaments, and re-creation that women can teach and lead men and relegates passages specifically calling for women to be silent as addressing a specific issue in the day, particularly the New Roman Woman.
Evaluation
McKnight raises a great number of issues that need to be addressed. I believe his idea of wiki-stories interpreting the great Story is at once novel, simplistic, and elegant. In a world we focus on the minutia, we need to recapture the great meta-narrative of the Bible and look at how it all fits together. McKnight helps us to see both the grand Story and how each book is a midrash of the Story. It was, in all honesty, beautiful.
I also believe he makes a compelling case for reading with tradition and not through tradition. Most of us have skipped 1500 years of Christian thought, failing to examine the Patristics, the Desert Fathers, Augustine, et. al. Most of what we know is what our tribes have produced in the past century or two. Being informed by these men gives us a greater perspective than simply seeing through the lens of our tribes traditions. It helps us answer the difficult questions, helps us in discernment, and helps us to see the Story interpreted in various times by various people.
Many might be frustrated that McKnight doesn’t give us a “how to” in regards to the discernment issue. He leaves that up to the Spirit, which I think is a bonus. Each person, even each tribe, will have different models of discernment. What he proposes does not lead to millions of readings of the Bible. But it will lead to many readings. “Culturally shaped readings of the Bible and culturally shaped expressions of the gospel are exactly what Paul did and wanted. (206)”
This is a wonderfully written book, easily readable. I read it in about 6-8 hours. And it has become quite a bit yellow from the highlighting. Were I to give it a rating on a scale of 1-5, it would be a 5. He has truly written a great book on Bibliology, and while not agreeing with everything he states, made me think on a variety of levels.
I want to close with a quote from the end of the book that I believe is the crux of his argument (and simply a great quote): “We are summoned by the God who speaks to us in the Bible to listen to God speak, to live out what God directs us to live out, and to discern how to live out the Story in our own day. (211)”
