We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue.
I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Do you think there’s a place for the self in Christian spirituality?
As Scot mentioned in chapter 6 of his book The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible listening is crucial to relating to God. And that’s what we want to do when reading the Bible: relate to God. The Bible is full of examples of the importance of listening and what happens when we do and don’t. In chapter 7 Scot highlights this and elaborates on how essential this is. Listening is an art that we hopefully get better and better at, and not worse.
Chapter 8 stresses that the aim of listening to the Bible is to love God and each other. This, according to Scot, is the Bible’s main message. We are often given or taught information about the Bible, but this usually doesn’t lead to transformation or the missional path. Biblical facts are important, but doing something with them is crucial – God wants his people to be equipped for every good work. To listen missionally is to be hooked up into and with those who have come before us. This is a process of listening and learning. We have to be willing to be challenged with what Scot calls the “so what?” in order to move to the “so that” we do good works and love God and others.
Scot’s book, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible is an essential book for our times and well worth reading. Highly recommended.
In chapter 6 one of the key points Scot makes is that we are to have a relationship to God, not just the text. The authoritative approach to the Bible often creates an unnecessary distance. There is more to reading the Bible than submitting to its authority – there is to be a personal relationship between us and God. Scot prefers to focus on a relational approach where God and the Bible are kept distinct. God is more, far more, than the book.
This approach asserts that the Bible is God’s written communication. We are not only to love God, but to listen to his words. These words are interconnected with each other and invite us to enter into the God’s big story. God wants us to know him, not just the Bible.
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue.
I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Why are many Christians so good at shooting their wounded?
If you want help in understanding today’s world and how to read the book of Revelation in light of it, pick up a copy of my Living Apocalypse: A Revelation Reader and A Guide for the Perplexed (Amazon; Barnes & Noble; or bookstores) for yourself or someone you think might benefit from a close analysis of this important and timely book of the Bible.
In chapter 4 of McKnight’s The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible, Scot highlights the primary importance of context when it comes to reading the Bible as story.
Some passages, for example, are considered important for then and not for now so it’s important to get the context. Scot points out the issue of charging interest and how it is conveniently overlooked. Most of us ignore the OT command found in Leviticus 25:35-38. That was then and this is now, Scot suggests, are seven words that “are the secret to reading the Bible.” Reading the Bible as story will help us discern between then and now. We have to go backward to go forward. Context. Acts 7 is a good example. Stephen recounts the story of Israel and how it opens onto the story of Jesus the Messiah.
Scot stresses the importance of reading the Bible as a whole. Seeking to master one writer or one part will end up distorting the whole and we need the whole. God reveals himself in language, and for Scot this was profoundly important to understand. Language has a context and God speaks through different contexts and different writers in a variety of ways that are all pertinent to the big story.
Playing off Wikipedia, Scot coins the term wiki-stories. What he means is that the Bible often presents a new version of an old story and that as readers it will help if we’re attuned to these multiple wiki-stories and how they find a place in the larger picture of what God is doing.
Turning to chapter 5, Scot proposes that the plot of the wiki-stories can be expressed in five themes:
Creating Eikons - Genesis 1-2
Cracked Eikons - Genesis 3-11
Covenant Community – Genesis 12 to Malachi
Christ the Perfect Eikon redeems – Matthew to Revelation 20
Consummation – Revalation 21-23
Scot elaborates on all these themes in interesting and provocative ways that tie them together into the whole story of the Bible.
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue.
I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
What are your thoughts on the global economic bailouts?
What is the Bible? Scot answer’s this question in his new book The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible. Scot puts forward the proposal, in chapter 3, that the Bible is story. It has a plot, and a beginning, middle, and end. As readers we need to be drawn into God’s great plot, and to be refreshed and renewed by participating and finding our place in the story ourselves. Getting into the Bible is like going on an interesting adventure. But participation and adventure carry with them a need for rigor, which in turn begins to get tough on our tendencies to take short cuts to achieve our own ends of having the Bible speak to us. As shortcuts in other areas of life, such as getting healthy and losing weight usually fail, so too taking short cuts when reading the Bible will deprive us of the real and living spiritual health we need.
While all short cuts are detrimental for good Bible reading, and there are many that could be mentioned, Scot points out five ways that we reduce the Bible and turn it into:
A collection of laws – no dancing, drinking, or films
A series of blessings and promises – these are fantastic and reliable, but can lead to false optimism – things do go wrong and some days are a catastrophe
A set of mirrors and inkblots – the Bible says what we desire it to and we impose and project ourselves upon it and smother its story replacing it with our own
A mixture of puzzle pieces – we put all the pieces together and have the puzzle completely figured out
A choosing of masters – deciding on a master, such as Paul or Jesus, and then reading the whole Bible through one or the other’s point of view
If short cuts will fail us, what might a long detour for learning to read the Bible as story look like? See the next post.
In chapter two of Scot McKnight’s new book The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible we read about a blue parakeet among sparrows. Bizarre? This story of backyard birdwatching gives Scot an analogy with what he calls blue parakeet passages in the Bible. Passages like these are those that stand out and cause us to query: does this passage apply today? What happens to us when we encounter difficult parts of the Bible? How do we read them/it?
Although there are many ways to read the Bible, Scot explores three:
Reading to Retrieve; Reading through Tradition; Reading with Tradition.
1) Reading to retrieve attempts to mine the days of old for today. But Scot points out that there is often no one to one correspondence between the biblical times and our own. The apostle Paul, already in the NT is adapting, (Jew to Jew, Gentile to Gentile), without abandoning the truth of God’s revelation. We, like Paul, have to find ways to adopt and adapt. Scot clearly warns that culture must not dictate as the gospel truths are transcultural. Yet, we have to work out these truths in our own day.
2) Reading through tradition asserts that, while it is important to learn to read the Bible oneself, the Bible must be understood in the wider context of the creeds of the church. This is fine, as long as it doesn’t turn into an inflexible traditionalism that Scot points out, ends up usurping biblical authority.
3) Reading with tradition claims that it is crucial to neither ignore nor idolize tradition. This requires a motion of going back and coming forward at the same time.
This chapter closes with a confession. Scot’s desire to master the Bible and to put it into nice comfortable system backfired. He was attempting to control the blue parakeets, rather than learning to listen to them. His plea is that we join him in listening to the Bible and his hope is that it comes to life for us, as it has for him, in relevant and dynamic ways that can be lived out.
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue.
I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Do you read the days in Genesis 1 as literal twenty four hour days?
The first two chapters of Scot McKnight’s new book The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible give a user friendly introduction to some of the key questions and issues concerning reading the Bible today.
Let’s start with chapter 1.
Scot begins with a recounting of his passion for Bible reading, which eventually raised the question of saying and doing. He realized this: Christians don’t always do what they say. Many Christians say they believe everything the Bible says and therefore do whatever it says, but this is a fallacy. Scot perceived there was a lot of picking and choosing going on and rightly flags this as a problem. He gives, out of the many he could mention, five examples of what the Bible seems to say, yet some Christians do not always do: keep the Sabbath, tithe, wash feet, express charismatic gifts, and share possessions. Pickers and choosers take what they want and leave the rest to the side. Add to this the disputed issues of Calvinism, war, evolution, etc. and we’re faced with the crucial question of how we are to live the Bible today. Scot honestly points out that this question causes him some discomfort and discontent, as it should for us all who take the Bible seriously. Applying the Bible today is an arduous, but worthwhile task. However, we need to face up to the problem of picking and choosing, while we focus on the question of how to read and live the Bible.
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue.
I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
How would you define home?
