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The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read The Bible

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The question of how we are to read the Bible is an important one for all times and all places. How individuals, churches, and denominations answer this question has real effects on real people's lives; it can be a force for liberation or oppression, it can be a stifling straitjacket or it can provide a . How we answer this question is crucially important, and McKnight clearly understands this as he tackles the question.

The first question the reader will likely have is 'what's with the title?' Well, McKnight is something of a bird-watching expert, it seems, and it was the presence of an unusual bird in his backyard one day, and the effect this new bird had on the others that got him thinking. The new bird turned out to be someone's pet blue parakeet that had escaped. But the presence of this bird in an unfamiliar context was what got McKnight thinking about the Bible. He likened this blue parakeet to passages in the Bible that seem strange, out of place, possibly even unwelcome. What do we do with these? Do we try to 'tame' them? Return them to their 'cages?' Ignore them? How we deal with the Bible's 'blue parakeets' is vitally important, and reveals a good deal about our general approach to Scripture.

According to McKnight, there are at least three basic strategies we tend to take when reading the Bible. First, we 'read to retrieve.' The Bible provides us with a straightforward template for living and we simply must apply this template'drawn from a time and place much different than our own'to our own lives in the twenty-first century. According to McKnight, this won't work because 'we aren't called to live 'first-century lives in the twenty-first century, but twenty-first century lives as we walk in the light of the revelation God gave to us in the first century.' The Bible itself shows adaptation to different contexts (think of the early church's wrestling with the question of how/if the Jewish law was to be understood in the light of Christ) and does not advocate a simple 'read and retrieve' approach to Scripture.

Second, we read through (as opposed to with) tradition. This amounts to more or less inflexibly reading the Bible the way 'we've' always read it, whether the 'we' is one of the great historical church traditions, or the own particular approach of the little non-denominational church on the corner. Here, this or that tradition assumes the position of authority and the effect is the same as in the first case: a context-bound approach to reading Scripture assumes an unwarranted position of primacy, and specific interpretations can become fossilized.

The third option is, obviously, the one McKnight recommends and it is a fairly straightforward narrative approach to Scripture in which the Bible is interpreted in community, with the wisdom of the history of Christian interpretation, and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Every specific passage has to be read in the broad context of the overarching drama of creation/fall/redemption or, as McKnight prefers, a movement from oneness (the harmony of initial shalom) to otherness (sin/estrangement, disunity) back to oneness. The story of the Bible is one of the Fall giving way (to varying degrees in various times and places) to the new Creation. For McKnight, the way we read the Bible ought to reflect this.

Obviously McKnight's book does not offer a radically new way of reading the Bible. His recommendation that we learn to read the Bible as a 'story' as opposed to a 'law-book' or a set of puzzle pieces to put together has been articulated by others ( N.T. Wright's The Last Word, and Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew's The Drama of Scripture leap to mind, if only because I've read them both in the last couple of years); however, McKnight does offer a fresh way of articulating these truths and his willingness to name what we are actually doing when we read the Bible is refreshing. He unapologetically admits that no one does everything the Bible says and that everyone has some principle by which they decide which verses apply in what way. Anabaptists, in particular, will resonate with McKnight's overarching interpretive principle as Jesus Christ'the goal of the entire story and the means by which it moves forward and will one day be consummated.

Readers may not always embrace McKnight's terminology'his designating the Bible's individual books/sections as 'wiki-stories' as an attempt to convey the idea that some writers felt free to take new turns in God's unfolding story is difficult to stomach, and his metaphor of reading the Bible as sliding down a waterslide with tradition as one wall, the canon as the other, and the Holy Spirit as the water which propels us to our destination is weird but effective'but his overall approach to Scripture is a good one. It is honest and humble, and its message is a necessary one in a culture in which so many unhelpful understandings of what the Bible is and does (from both Christians and non-Christians) exist. Overall, it is a helpful book and worth reading.

It seems to me that not a week goes by when someone doesn't ask me- in person, on the phone, via email, etc.- my "position on women in leadership". Of course, this is not that complicated for me to answer. It is the follow up question that gets me: "How do you support that Biblically?". And generally they want a quick answer. After attempting to do so a few times, with little success, I realized that we were never really talking about women in leadership. Or, to be precise, we would have a failure to communicate because we weren't starting from the place: how we read the Bible.

This is why I find Scot McKnight's new book, "The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read The Bible" so important. Like so many people, I was raised in a good Evangelical community that strongly affirmed the importance of the Bible, but lacked a cohesive understanding of how to do that. It took many years of trial and error, effort and study to build that foundation. This book is that great foundation.

Addressing the all too common short-cuts we have used to read the Bible, Scot suggests that in order to understand the Bible, we must address some key questions:

What Is The Bible? (Story)
What Do I Do With The Bible? (Listening)
How Do I Benefit From The Bible? (Discerning)

In his very personal and refreshing style, Scot navigates the challenges we all face with the Bible, showing a promising approach to understanding what we are reading and what it means to us today, in the specifics of our lives and cultures.

What makes this great book even better is Part 4 "Women In Church Ministry Today", in which we see this approach to Scripture at work on this very divisive issue. Of course, there is no way Scot could have been even close to exhaustive in this, but he presents enough to help people move forward confidently for further study. Far too many books on this topic, while excellent, are far too academic for the average reader. Scot bridges that gap.

My confidence in this book is such that we are adding it the required reading for all of our future student in our Discipleship Training School. Well done, Scot!

What a great job by Scot McKnight, again. He is so helpful in identifying the issues we face as we read the Scriptures and attempt to interpret them for our day in our way. Anyone who wants to know how the Bible can impact their lives and our world needs to read this book.