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The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Hardcover)

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Any book that forces you to stop, think, and reevaluate what you believe is a book worth reading. Scot McKnight's new book The Blue Parakeet is that kind of book.

McKnight uses an odd encounter with an out of place bird (I won't spoil the story) to illustrate the way many people approach reading the Bible. In particular McKnight's concern is that Christians aren't making the effort to understand those passages in Scripture that seem somewhat out of place from the rest. McKnight suggests that there a number of these passages which are not only being ignored because of their apparent difficulty; some passages are even being silenced by Bible readers today.

It's bad enough that Christians might choose to ignore or silence teachings found in God's Word, but as McKnight argues even worse is the fact that the Church is being harmed as a result. McKnight surveys a number of these "blue parakeet" passages in his book, but focuses in on one teaching that he believes is detrimental to the Body of Christ: the role of women in the church.

As I considered McKnight's story there were a number of points he made that resonated with me, especially related to the general level of biblical ignorance that is present in our churches. The book offered some helpful discussion to help Bible readers better under the text they have. There were other times when McKnight's arguments went in directions that I found some discord with. But even in these points of disagreement, McKnight's witting style caused me to at least reconsider that which I believed to be true.

I did feel that the sections related to the topic of women in ministry tilted the balance of the book beyond what the subtitle (Rethinking How You Read the Bible) indicated the book was to be about. I do not think that the example was out of place; in fact it fit well with the other "hot button topics" McKnight pointed to in order to illustrate his point. I wonder if his passion for the subject would have been better served in a separate work. There did come a point in reading this work that I felt as if I were reading an entirely different book from what had come before.

That being said, The Blue Parakeet is definitely worth reading and will be a helpful tool for anyone who needs to shore up their own understanding of how they approach and read the Bible.

BE FOREWARNED: THIS IS A LONG POST. SORRY.

Special thanks to Dr. McKnight for the invitation, and to Zondervan for the advance reader's copy.

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Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008). 240 pp. (Page references given in this review refer to the paperback "advance reader copy" and may not be accurate when used with the final, publication edition.)

In The Blue Parakeet, McKnight (The Jesus Creed, A Community Called Atonement, The Real Mary) wades waist-deep into the internecine conflict over hermeneutics and the way hermeneutical decisions shape the evolution of Christian theology, orthodoxy, and religious praxis. But that's not the language McKnight, a seminary professor, would use to describe this book. In fact, he's trying - too hard, methinks - to distance himself from his theology vocation and write primarily for the masses. His audience in Parakeet is probably best approximated by his impressively large, denominationally diverse blog community (www.jesuscreed.org), composed of laypersons, paid ministers, and academics, most of whom share McKnight's somewhat postmodern outlook.

Rather, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he is representing his blog community, not speaking to them. Viewed against McKnight's prolific web journal, The Blue Parakeet is arguably an extended apology for the emergent brand of evangelical Christianity within which most of his blog community dwells. Broadly speaking, McKnight's eclectic blogosphere is weary of mainstream American Christianity with its naive, simplistic approach to resolving the cognitive dissonance that results when the uninitiated reader encounters Blue Parakeets.

But what are these strange birds, anyway? And what do they have to do with hermeneutics?

Blue Parakeets serve double duty in McKnight's book. At the outset, they are odd passages, isolated verses, surprising narratives, or strange teachings that don't fit cleanly into a reader's interpretive paradigm - or, for that matter, that don't fit into any of the classic orthodoxies without some creative sophistry. For readers who take a surpassingly high view of chastity and sexual modesty, for example, the stories of Ruth "uncovering Boaz' feet" and Tamar's brazen seduction of Judah - especially when the women are presented as heroines - are Blue Parakeets. They are the square pegs that the Bible invites the reader to shoehorn into round, doctrinal holes. What are we to make of a seemingly double-tongued Jehovah who requires sexual purity but lauds a seductress? What are we to do with an Anointed One who permits a two-bit whore to shame the pious, chaste elites?

Secondly, as McKnight develops his hermeneutical thesis, Blue Parakeets assume human form as people who serve a contrarian, prophetic, de-centering function for those of us who have grown comfortable in our personal orthodoxies. In New Testament terms, for example, Cornelius is the Blue Parakeet to Peter's Judaic exclusivism. McKnight himself reels off a litany of Blue Parakeets who have sailed through his life in the classroom. Parakeets are the living embodiment of the difficult hermeneutical questions that inevitably arise when we let the Scriptures speak for themselves.

The overriding theme in Parakeet - true to McKnight's academic training - is intellectual honesty. There are many ways of trying to come to terms with the Blue Parakeets on the sacred page, but they all seem to require some sort of mental gymnastics - either ignoring the plain sense out of hand, or reading one's extrabiblical philosophies and traditions into the text to mitigate the difficulties, or imposing interpretive rules after the fact in order to achieve a predetermined outcome. McKnight puts his finger squarely on half a dozen ways that we play dishonest or disingenuous games with the Biblical text in order to make it all fit. If there is a single, great service that The Blue Parakeet will accomplish, it is to make all of us face our hermeneutical sins and inconsistencies in their naked glory. Every one of us is guilty of it to some extent: we find ways to take the Blue Parakeets and mold them to fit in some unnatural way.

It is one thing, however, to render an accurate diagnosis of a disease that has afflicted us ever since we began writing to each other. It is another thing to propose a coherent alternative, a way of reading that helps us avoid the hermeneutical pitfalls that are always nearby. McKnight lends his voice in The Blue Parakeet to the chorus of contemporary authors (e. g., Eugene Peterson's Eat This Book) who argue persuasively for a narrative approach to Scripture. In this view, the Scriptures are not a static, prescriptive account of how religious lives ought to be ordered; they are an ongoing, ever-developing record of how people throughout (Middle Eastern and European) history have worked out their relationship to God, their place in the world, and their understanding of how best to live. As such, the Scriptures invite the reader into humanity's cultural arc, a trajectory in which each generation must reevaluate for itself its predecessors' arguments and conclusions, sift those arguments through a cultural mesh, and extract the seminal ideas capable of informing new cultural judgments in new cultural settings.

That, of course, is also the antinomian danger of a narrative approach: if Scriptural doctrine and ethics are culturally contingent, what considerations constrain our reading of the text so that we do not make "God's will" merely a reflection of our own, dominant culture, robbing "God's will" of its divinity and its transcendent authority? The solution McKnight offers us, which he calls a "third way" between extremes, is to read the Bible with church tradition, as opposed to reading it (a) through church tradition (after Stanley Hauerwas, for example) or (b) thoughtlessly divorced from church tradition (the neo-evangelical temptation).

McKnight's test case for illustrating how his tradition-informed approach differs from our tradition-bound or tradition-illiterate approaches is, "what is the proper role of the woman in public expressions of Christianity?" The last several chapters of the book explore that question in dialogue with Scripture. McKnight first asks, "what did women do in the Bible?" He finds numerous examples of women who served God's purposes in a variety of public leadership roles, and then he grapples with the difficult, direct teachings of Paul that appear, at face value, to contradict those examples of women in authority. Implicit throughout McKnight's argument is the narrative lens that is foundational to the entire book: narrative evidence ("what did women do?") trumps doctrinal evidence ("what did so-and-so say that women ought to do?"). For McKnight, given the narrative evidence that God called, equipped, and confirmed women in roles of public authority, the burden of proof lies upon those who believe Huldah and Deborah and Priscilla to be exceptions to God's will rather than compelling evidence of it.

One wishes that McKnight had dealt more explicitly and extensively with the question of burden of proof as he develops his argument. After all, the primary purpose of Parakeet is to gain a fresh, open-minded hearing among his fellow evangelicals, people for whom assigning the burden of proof is a vital first step in persuasion. Modern evangelicals - McKnight numbers himself among them, but clearly sees himself as a black sheep and a dissident - are not likely to be persuaded by an argument that merely shifts the burden of proof from one side to the other at the outset. (For his part, McKnight would probably reject my binary, one-or-the-other-but-not-both formulation.)

The Blue Parakeet is an important work and is laced with valuable insights for us laypersons who are struggling to reconcile their intuition, their changing cultural setting, and their reading of Scripture over important doctrinal matters. McKnight frames the key, hermeneutical issues in a helpful, accessible way. Technical specialists in Scripture, though familiar with the basis for McKnight's arguments, may be less impressed by his method. McKnight begins with the assertion that Scripture ought to be read through a narrative lens centered in a particular narrative trajectory (the restoration of unity and the evaporation of arbitrary distinctions), and then feigns delight later when his reading of Paul's teachings on women's roles is "consistent, then, with the story and plot of the Bible" (p. 203). Of course it is; his setup and follow-through ensured that it would be.

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Stylistically and editorially, I found The Blue Parakeet distracting, but perhaps that tells more about me than about the book. The following observations should be taken with a grain of salt.

My overarching criticism of McKnight's style is that in his effort to connect with a non-academic audience, his writing is overtly self-conscious and does not give the reader credit for being able to detect irony or wit without the author's help. Until I read his other books - this is my first exposure to them - I cannot tell whether that is (a) a standard McKnight feature or (b) an artifact of his choice of audience in this case. To say that the style is "insulting" would surely be too strong, but I did find myself wishing McKnight would give me more credit.

Editorially, the prose could stand some tightening, and here are some illustrative examples. There are oddly selected verbs (p. 159: "eyeballing it into three basic options?"); presumptuous shifts from "I" to "we" (p. 154); unnecessary self-references ("I am arguing" and "Let me play with that metaphor by..." on p. 144); clumsy parallels and restatements (p. 144 again); and flabby, superfluous constructions ("it need only be mentioned that..." on p. 139). An appropriate watchword for the final, editorial sweep before printing: concision.

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Now to disagreements. The chapter on "patterns of discernment" is an important contribution that helps us to be honest about the inconsistent logic that we often use when we apply Scripture to some vexing ethical, religious, and political questions. But McKnight gives short shrift to Christian thinkers of the past. On p. 140, for example, McKnight says (with reference to speaking in tongues) that "a pattern of discernment arose that `tongues aren't for today, they were a sign gift of the first century.'" He then notes that when the charismatic movements of the 1970s and 1980s emerged, "the `pattern' was discerned as a `no longer not for us' pattern. In other words, `that was then, but this is now' became a `that was then, and it is also now' pattern." Just like that.

Does he believe that the "patterns of discernment" were merely ad hoc, or does he believe that some of them were carefully reasoned? Supernatural manifestations of God's power are no occasion for sloppy thinking or bland, noncommittal splitting of differences. If they are genuine, they are powerful evidence for God in a society that demands hard evidence; but if they are counterfeit or contrived, they are powerful evidence that Christians (especially) are dupes, frauds, and simpletons, and the church's witness, our credibility in the world of ideas, is seriously diminished. Unfortunately, McKnight seems not to be terribly concerned about that; he appears more concerned that we just not fight about it.

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In chess, a "gambit" occurs when Player A sacrifices a piece - without immediately taking an equivalent piece from an opponent - in order to secure a more advantageous position on the chessboard. If Player B takes the gambit, Player B enjoys a short-term advantage in firepower; but if the gambit is skillfully played, Player A reaps a positional advantage whose benefits do not emerge until much later in the game, when the kings are more exposed and the stakes are higher with every move.

McKnight's discussion of I Corinthians 9:19-23 ("I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some") is standard, missional fare (pp. 142-144); it is the primary proof text cited to support cultural innovations, adaptations, and (sometimes) compromises of many kinds. Its rhetorical force often shows up in uncritical statements like, "if [an innovation] furthers the gospel, how can it possibly be wrong?" McKnight allows himself to be drawn in by a clever gambit.

The central issue here is to decide what we mean - or what Paul meant - by, "furthering the gospel." In modern, evangelical settings, for example, it is commonly if tacitly thought that getting more people through the front doors and into the theater seats (!) is "furthering the gospel;" as the logic goes, then, nearly anything short of pornography or drinking contests that gets fannies into the seats is an appropriate means of cultural adaptation in the church. But thoughtful scholars like Philip Kenneson (Life on the Vine, Selling Out the Church) have provided carefully reasoned arguments to the contrary. To Kenneson, many of our clever strategies and tactics for filling the seats actually do long-term violence to the church's long-term, prophetic stance in society. In short, by adopting and adapting those tactics, we may gain numerically, but we lose positionally.

I do not mean to suggest that The Blue Parakeet is a sell-out or that McKnight is an uncritical accommodationist. I do not believe either is true. Moreover, I do believe that thoughtful, cultural adaptation is an important aspect of the church's incarnational mandate as the body of Christ. But I am disappointed that McKnight does not raise these issues and deal with them explicitly and at length. How are we to know when a cultural accommodation is benign and when it is malignant? How are we to determine when we have sacrificed too much at the altar of cultural relevance and congruence? The naive reader - and there will be many of them who pick up this book - is vulnerable to the shifting wind of doctrine and may not be equipped to discern rightly and well. McKnight owes such readers a fair warning, but he does not deliver it with adequate force.

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With some caveats, I am inclined to agree with McKnight's thesis. If nothing else, McKnight has helped me confront the incoherence in my fundamentalist approach to Scripture. And as to McKnight's case study of women's public roles in the church, I am on a similar journey; Deborah and Priscilla have been blue parakeets in my backyard for quite some time, but the Joyce Meyers of the world have been holding me back from a full commitment. I still have questions, and I think they're valid ones, so McKnight hasn't closed the deal.

qb

The Blue Parakeet is a readable challenge to the way many Christians are reading the Bible today. Blue parakeets are a metaphor for passages or concepts in the Bible which do not conform to one's theological, cultural, or traditional presuppositions. McKnight addresses these blue parakeets in four movements: (1) Story: What is the Bible? (2) Listening: What do I do with the Bible? (3) Discerning: How do I benefit from the Bible? (4) Women in church ministries today.

On the positive side McKnight is to be commended for challenging Christians to take their Bible reading and application seriously. His writing is conversational in tone and generally irenic in spirit (although he takes periodic shots, e.g., p. 176). Some will also appreciate his culturally relevant metaphors ("wiki," "WDWD" a take-off of WWJD], etc.). The author's pastoral spirit and transparency is also refreshing.

Having said this, this book was a bit frustrating to read. McKnight's assertions are rarely validated and sometimes remained unexplained. While some of this may be attributed to the popular nature of the book- it is obviously not intended to be a scholarly treatise, one would still expect some level of validation. Unfortunately, he appears to devote more space to personal anecdotes than clarification and argumentation. For example, McKnight writes, "God was on the move God is on the move; and God will always be on the move" (p. 33). Perhaps his assertion is true, but what does it mean for God to "move"? This sounds a bit like Process Theology. Further, how does McKnight's God of movement relate to a closed Canon? Another example can be seen in McKnight's assertion that the central theme of the Scriptures is oneness (pp. 66-79). Again this might be possible, but there is insufficient evidence to support his point and the point is crucial to his argument that the Bible is story. The problem is the identification of a meta-theme for Scripture is more challenging than the reader might be led to believe. The challenging nature of identifying the meta-theme is evidenced by the lack of scholarly consensus regarding the "centers" of either Testament, much less both Testaments together, which a quick perusal of the numerous published Old and New Testament theologies and their proposed "centers" will reveal.

Perhaps the lack of careful validation is most evident in the final section concerning women in ministry where one assumes that the author is putting into practice the methodology that he is suggesting we follow. Three examples will have to suffice here. First, McKnight attempts to argue for the egalitarian view concerning women in ministry by asking What Did Women Do (WDWD). He seems to think that if he can show that women performed some leadership or ministerial functions in the Bible then they should be able to do any leadership or ministerial function in the church today. This argument is not only a non sequitur, but it is also faulty on several counts. It fails to recognize the important distinction in Scripture's narratives between what is descriptive (what happened) and what is prescriptive or normative (what should happen). If the narratives involving women are descriptive then they surely cannot be used to overturn the prescriptions in 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 11and 14. If one concludes that all the narratives involving women in Scripture were prescriptive then one has to explain the absence of women as high priests, kings (unless you want to throw in Athaliah!), and the omission of women from the Twelve Apostles. Using McKnight's argument, could not one conclude that the predominant picture of male leadership in Scripture is equally prescriptive? Another problem with author's WDWD is how he handles some of the evidence. McKnight's appeal to Deborah is a case in point. It is generally acknowledged by scholars that the period of the Judges was a time of spiritual regression in which everyone did what was right in their own eyes (Judg 17:6; 21:25). If this is the case, then should we not read all the judges in the book of Judges, including Deborah, from this perspective? Would the original readers of Judges have said, "Wow, Deborah is a great example of egalitarianism!" Or might the original readers have concluded that the period of the Judges was a period of social and religious upheaval in which the men failed to lead as they should have? I suggest that the latter is much more likely given the nature of the period and even Deborah's own statement in Judges 4:9. Therefore, if Deborah is a blue parakeet in Judges, it is simply because the men were head-buried ostriches during a time of moral, political, and spiritual decay.

A second example of faulty argumentation is McKnight's all or nothing approach. He argues that "If a woman is given the freedom to explain the gospel and persuade others to respond to the gospel, and if the message of evangelism shapes how a person will eventually live as a Christian, consistency would demand that we either bar women from evangelism or permit to teach and preach as well" (p. 154). By this logic, the Old Testament Law would be inconsistent, because it required that all the priests be of the tribe of Levi and the high priest had to be of the family of Aaron. Did this mean that consistency would demand that all the men who were not in the tribe of Levi were not to participate in religious rituals since they could not be priests? It is worth noting that even men were not given full equality in the Old Testament. A similar point can be made in the New Testament. Applying McKnight's "either/or" proposal would demand that men who do not meet the standard of eldership (1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1) be either included in the eldership regardless of their lack of qualifications, or be completely exempt from spiritual consecration or duty. At one point, McKnight notes that many of his friends gravitate to the problem texts (1 Cor 14 and 1 Tim 2) as the starting point of the discussion. He notes that this is "like asking about marriage in the Bible and gravitating toward the divorce texts" (p. 163). Consequently he begins his discussion with what women have done in Scripture. Fair enough, but perhaps McKnight needs to take one further step backwards. Namely, begin by looking at the texts that limited the role of men such as noted above. Positions of formal spiritual leadership in Scripture have, more often than not, been exclusive rather than inclusive.

A third example of the weaknesses of McKnight's application of his methodology as it relates to the role of women is his discussion of Mary (pp. 176-79). His assertions are speculative and his conclusions are dubious. How one gets from Mary to egalitarianism escapes me. This statement is not meant to diminish Mary's role or importance in the Jesus story. One can affirm Mary as Theotokos. But isn't the fact that Mary is a woman more predicated on the idea that Messiah was to be fully human and thus birthed by a woman rather than some kind of affirmation regarding egalitarianism? If God wanted to show Mary as a paradigmatic picture of egalitarianism in the New Testament then it seems that He has chosen to do so rather obscurely. Mary's role as a leader or otherwise, in the early church, receives scant attention in Acts or the Epistles. Furthermore, one also needs to determine whether the narratives which mention Mary were written to be prescriptive or descriptive.

In conclusion, McKnight's call to take another look at Scripture is worth heeding. But there are some clear problems with his methodology especially regarding his test case of women in ministry. In following McKnight's example, we may find that some blue parakeets may turn out to be red herrings! Nonetheless, one might be thankful that The Blue Parakeet will elicit further discussion about Scripture.

Much thanks to Scot McKnight for his advance reader copy of his latest book.

The main objective of The Blue Parakeet is to answer the question(s) of reading the Bible in a manner which is both faithful to the biblical text while being meaningful to the modern world. McKnight illustrates this in his opening chapter by raising some questions of how to read various parts of Scripture, highlighting the fact that Christians have long taken certain portions of the Bible to faithful practice while ignoring other parts (sometimes side-by-side passages!). This is a situation which is prevalent in the church and seeks an answer. McKnight has made a solid step forward in this discussion.

The book is well-written, being both accessible to a wide variety of readers while also reflecting a solid base of academic rigor and scholarship. One can easily tell that McKnight has spent much time interacting with undergraduate students, as he is constantly mindful of showing relevance to the theoretical by including various illustrations to help in the learning process. The book itself is divided into four parts, three of which carry the weight of the book's main idea: that the Bible can be accessible and living for us, if we can teach ourselves how to read it.

Section One: Story
The primary quest of this section is to find an approach which will ". . .turn the two-dimensional words on paper into a three dimensional encounter with God. . ." (41). McKnight thus explores the notion that Scripture contains a story, beginning with his view of various "shortcuts" to a full and proper reading of the text. Against these approaches he suggests a reading which will encompass the biblical perspective, and embrace the story which is on these pages. This requires a reading which allows the story to emerge within each writer's own perspective - allowing Paul to be Paul, Peter to be Peter, and Jesus to be Jesus for example. In explaining this McKnight uses the notion of a "wiki-story" (63ff.), the notion that while different authors and stories exist (and give their own version of the bigger story), they are held together by the larger narrative. These are the blue parakeets which are loose in the biblical text.

Section Two: Listening
In setting forth an answer to how one should read the Bible, McKnight proposes a relational approach - that through these pages we are summoned to a relationship with God. There is an authority in the text, but one which works through the relationship of reader/church, the text itself, and God. The question thus becomes, "What is our relationship to the God who speaks to us in the Bible?" (which is specifically addressed in Chapter 7). Such approach demands that we learn to listen in order to grasp what the story holds. McKnight offers an approach to "missional listening" in Chapter 8. This idea is simply that the story in the Bible is intended to make an impact into the world - we must listen within the context of being missional.

Section Three: Discerning
The final section navigates the difficult task of figuring out which of the biblical commands and ideals are to be kept, and which ones we are allowed to ignore (at least, practically speaking). After demonstrating that this is a more difficult endeavor than might be initially realized, McKnight suggests finding the "pattern of discernment" which is visible in the tradition of the church and is available through the work of the Spirit. By understanding some of the 'wiki-stories' which are in Scripture, we might find our way of living out our (wiki-)faith into our world. The latter half of Chapter 10 includes six areas where such decisions have been made, and continue to be raised.

Section Four: Women in Church Ministries Today
At first glance, I disappointingly expected this section to be disjointed appendix to an otherwise interesting book. Evidently I did not immediately see this issue as a simple hermeneutical-method problem. And, having labored through my share of texts on the debate, I hope that I will not be faulted for being less than enthusiastic about the topic.

However, I must say that these final five chapters are of the most well-written, thoughtful, and biblical perspectives I have encountered regarding the debate over women in church ministry. McKnight approaches the topic clearly and straightforwardly, but does not lose sight of the reality of either the mission of the church or the real-life impact of women engaged in ministry.

Overall, McKnight comes out as a proponent of women working alongside men in the church (under, over, all that good stuff). There is a strong commitment in this book to hear the whole of Scripture and not only those parts which are deemed 'pertinent' to the debate. This is likened here with that of teaching on marriage by looking only at those few passages which speak about divorce. When we discuss the role of women in ministry we must be, McKnight contends, willing to hear the whole of the story. And there is abundantly more positive than negative when viewing the entirety.

It would be interesting to consider how using this book in an introduction to biblical interpretation course would go. So much of the material is good and necessary for the church (especially young interpreters) to hear and understand, although McKnight does not go in and out of various types and styles of the literature employed. Rather, he is content to see the story as a whole and to watch it move through its various incarnations within the text - and into the world today. This one comes highly recommended.

[grasshoppersdreaming.blogspot.com]

[...]I was privileged to receive an advanced copy of this book. However, I was unable to finish it before publishing. Why? Because it engaged me. It did not simply inform or coerce. McKnight has a knack for asking the most important question as he writes: what does it matter for life? The Blue Parakeet is a book written to ask this question: What does [the Bible] matter to life? It is a complex question, and McKnight begins to shed light on it with this excellent book

Will you agree with everything he says? No. Will you get frustrated with his simplicity and hasty generalizations? yes. But this book needs to be read in light of its goal, to challenge our preconceptions of the Bible.

McKnight is a master of illustration. He has one for every point of his book. This helps the average reader who just wants to be able to "get it". He uses personal stories and examples as well as abstract ideas to help us understand a few primary themes throughout the book:

1) we all pick and choose parts of the Bible to follow
2) it is impossible not to do number 1
3) God wants to speak to us through the Bible as His story
4) we need to learn how to hear God speaking to us today
5) the Bible is written for he purpose of helping us incarnate Christ in our day
6) How do we do this?

McKnight raises as many questions as answers, and uses women in ministry as an example of how to read the Bible in light of the fact that God speaks in our days in our ways. This is an excellent section in the book, but really deserves an entire book, where McKnight can fully examine the evidence on both sides, use better debate practices, and engage the issue. But that's not the point of this book. The point is to challenge the reader, and that he does throughout the entire book.

The reason I gave the book 5 stars: It challenged me personally (a seminary student). It can challenge a new Christian. It will challenge all who pick it up. I continue to find myself remembering mcknight's work throughout my daily life. Any book that makes me think beyond the pages is valuable to me. This one makes me question, wonder, believe, and doubt, but most of all, love a God who speaks.

The book is about application, not theory. It is a great starting point for any Christian who wants more from their Bible reading. It is a welcomed addition to my library and I recommend it to most anyone I know who reads the Bible.

Using a blue parakeet as a metaphor for those scriptures that don't conform to our preconceived notions, McKnight challenges us to read the Bible in new ways. The Blue Parakeet calls us to "read the Bible WITH tradition" - ie, willing to innovate but interacting with our forefathers so as not to deviate from their wisdom unnecessarily.

McKnight then ASSERTS that THE proper way to read the Bible is as a story he describes as creation, fall, covenant community, redemption, and consummation (described using in-house and postmodern terms). The book then asserts that every part of the Bible is a "wiki-story" (mini-story that retells at least some of the elements) of that overarching story. The only way to make sense of "Blue Parakeets," we're told, is by viewing them in the context of this Story.

At no point does Scot defend any of his assertions: the idea of an overarching story, his "plot" for the story, or the nature of the wiki-stories (nor does he deal with apparent counterexamples). He's proposing a new way of reading and understanding the Bible and seems to expect the reader to just take him at his word.

The book continues to teach about the manner in which we should read the Bible and offer thoughts as to how we should put the scriptures into practice.

Scot then tries to demonstrate this method by applying it to the question of women in church leadership. The argument is undercut by (among other problems) his reliance on a method that he has, to all appearances, pulled out of thin air.

Overall, there are merits to what McKnight teaches here, but he ought to defend his assertions. I wish he had fleshed out the first and third parts of the book and made the fourth (women in leadership) a separate book. As it is, he tries to do too much and accomplishes little. If you really want to know what he teaches here, you can read just the last chapter and really not miss anything.

I loved this book!! For my entire life, the teachings of conservative Christians on women and their role in the church, have not made sense. The verses that were always pulled out of scripture to validate a 'male only' model of church leadership did not seem consistent with the teachings of Jesus. I think Scot McKnight has given a thoughtful and heartfelt answer to many questions I've had for a long time. I wish all men in the church would read it.

I really enjoyed the book, and I'm glad that McKnight is one of those scholars who knows how to write for a popular audience. His style makes it apparent that he really cares about the church, and about how ordinary Christians understand Scripture. Reading the book actually reminded me a lot of conversations I had with professors at college.

Essentially, the book is about how to best read Scripture. As we read the pages of the Bible, we all come across these portions that don't fit into our normal understanding of things. McKnight calls these "blue parakeets." The question is then What should we do with these blue parakeets? Being conscious of the question is the first step toward taking Bible reading seriously. For instance, have you ever noticed how we usually disregard Paul's statements regarding men and long hair (1 Corinthians 11:14), but we take Paul's instructions regarding overseers in the church (1 Timothy 3:1-7; Titus 1:7-9) very literally? I think this book should be required reading alongside How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth during freshman Bible courses. Though the two books are very different, I believe they would complement one another nicely.

The second half of the book is a case study in one big blue parakeet. McKnight takes on the issue of women in church ministry. He walks the reader through what women actually did in the Old and New Testaments, and then presents a case for understanding Paul's commandments about women remaining silent in churches as a "that was for then" commandment. Though some will no doubt disagree with his conclusion, the exercise is valuable. In the end, I think McKnight walked a careful line, maintaining the understanding that Scripture is God's unchanging Word, while allowing for the possibility that well-established traditions regarding preferred ways of reading certain texts may be wrong. Again, some may not agree with McKnight's conclusions, but the journey is worth it.

Scot McKnight, professor in Religious Studies at North Park University has written a provocative, engaging, and winsome book about how we apply and study the Bible. At the beginning of the book, McKnight drives home the point that believers are always engaging the bible by adopting and adapting some portion of Scripture at the expense of other sections (12-13). He goes onto give examples of biblical material including tithing and footwashing that offer some explicit commands that many Christians fail to follow. Admittedly, some of these examples do not prove their point, as in the case of footwashing being a normative activity (McKnight references John 13:14 as his basis). Yet, McKnight's questions are on the right track when he states, "I've learned that it is time to think about why and how we pick what we pick and why and how we choose what we choose" (19). In other words, our picking selected passages and themes in the Scripture over against others, or our failing to see our own prescribed biases when reading Scripture only exacerbates our blind vision of the heart of the biblical message. Secondly, something that McKnight could bring out more, is that by seeing the overarching character of the unity of the Scriptures (OT and NT) we are less inclined to make the assertion that one part of the Scripture has no relevance for today.

Birdwatching for McKnight and his wife is a enjoyable hobby. In the second chapter, he tells of the time when a pet blue parakeet came upon the area where the sparrows in his back lawn were playing. At first, they were 'terrorized by our visitor the blue parakeet,' but instead of flying off they gradually befriended this blue parakeet and became good friends. This story is McKnight's way of orienting us toward three ways we understand the bible for today. We retrieve the Bible to practice its message in its totality while some draw only what it culturally applicable from its message. Secondly, others read through tradition. We see this in the Lutheran, Anglican, and Reformed churches. Confessionally, Presbyterian churches read the Scriptures through the system of doctrine set forth in the Westminster Confession of Faith while Lutherans view their Bibles both through the Larger and Smaller Catechism's of Luther and The Book of Concord. This idea of reading the Bible thorugh tradition is much like a conceptual grid upon which we interpret and apply the Bible. Lastly, McKnight references a view that he ascribes too that reads the Bible with tradition (25-35). "We need to have profound respect for our past without giving it final authority" (35).

McKnight's sketch of three ways that we read the Bible is helpful but inadequate in the end. Many coming from a confessional background instead have sought to reformulate confessional language and ideas as to give them no weight at all. I think that another way many interpret the Bible is through a broader understanding of life understood through worldview (both conceptual and practical). Everyone comes to the text with a worldview (liberal, conservative, in between). Many times our worldviews our characterized apart from an interpretive community but rather in conformity with culture, our preferences. In some cases, our worldview lens upon which we interpret scripture is blind to our anti-historical prejudices. I think however, what McKnight is getting at is the balance between the weight of Christian thought through history and the prominence of God speaking through his people today.

What is helpful about the next section of the book is McKnight's insistence that we regard the bible as 'Story.' Too long have we piecemealed portions of Scripture to fit a thematic line of thought that have not given full weight to the narrative that God was writing in his Word and through his work. McKnight sees the Bible as Story concept as coming together through 'wiki-stories' (66-67). Each author provides his account of God's work in concert with the plot of the whole Bible (creation to consummation). McKnight is right all the way to bring in to the discussion the supreme importance of the Trinitarian work in both creation and redemption (66). You can see echoes of Barth's Church Dogmatics here in McKnight's understanding of the Trinity's work. The only problem that I have with McKnight's discussion of these overarching stories that form the unity of the 'Story' is his disparaging of systematic theology. Good systematic theology takes the insights of biblical theology and uses them to form a cohesive discussion about specific topics. His problem was that the Biblical authors were not allowed to speak ('the authors themsevles were not give their day before the jury' (62). Some systematics seem to only want to provide extra biblical categories for the topics without reference to the Biblical ideas. Yet, this should not mean that we throw away the insights of systematic theology (a good example of the synthesis between biblical and systematic theology is in Far as the Curse is Found by Michael Williams).

Lastly, McKnight takes much time at the end of the book to describe the issues surrounding women in ministry. McKnight surveys women's roles in the OT and NT as providing a basis for women serving in the ministry. His comment at the end of one chapter is to the point, "If women did all this, why does Paul speak of silencing women in public assemblies?" (185). I understand and appreciate the roles that women took part in both testaments, but am not sure the logic coheres that by providing examples of women in ministry in the Bible we are providing a basis for their present day employment in that same service. I can resonate with McKnight's understanding of the silence passage in 1 Timohty 2 and 1 Corinthians 14 that women were not here called to silent forever but were asked not to speak and question in the service without proper training in education and ministry. Yet, one issue he does not address is the complementarian's position that equality is not the issue of discussion for women in the ministry but the notion of roles. Women are not inferior by any means but as the complementarian believes, are made for different roles in the local church. Have we faltered in encouraging women in ministry, in their giftings and capacities? Yes. But I think that McKnight's take does not quite understand the other side of the issue.

Overall, this book was both illuminating and disturbing. It provides a good beginning for asking the right questions about our interpretive stances. It also pushes us to see that we interpret the Bible selectively whether we want to see it or not. This book was also a bit disturbing because McKnight seems to overemphasize some points while not considering other positions (systematic theology, complementarianism). I would gladly offer this book to those who want to start reading their Bibles more carefully and start asking the right questions concerning living out the Bible.

Much thanks to Zondervan Publishing Company for the review copy.

Another great book from Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet challenges us to examine the way in which we read the Bible. Taking the obvious examples of the Mosaic law code, Scot forces the reader to acknowledge that no-one follows the Bible in a 100% literal fashion and we ALL pick and choose which parts we follow and which parts we ignore or sideline (these are the "Blue Parakeets" of the Bible that we cage up - if you read the book you'll get the analogy). In particular Scot looks at some misguided methods of approaching the bible, like as a law book or manual for life, or as a puzzle to work out - these misguided methods too often result in fixed interpretations that become hardened traditions.

McKnight's preferred method of reading the Bible is to read scripture as story and then discerning how to apply what we read to our lives in our days. In this we are ultimately guided by the Holy Spirit and also by history and tradition, although we should not be enslaved by these.

To demonstrate in a more practical way how the "reading the Bible as Story" approach works, McKnight tackles the issue of women in ministry where he effectively argues that the overall trajectory of the Biblical narrative, and the roles of women in the story, would strongly support female leadership and teaching roles. To this overall thrust we should then subordinate those few passages which seem contradictory and in favour of keeping women silent. While not ignoring these passages McKnight places them within the context of the Story and the cultural situations of the churches to which Paul was writing.

The Blue Parakeet challenges the way we read the Bible, forcing us to acknowledge that this reading is a matter of choosing and prioritising. The reading as Story approach and considering how each wiki fits into the overall narrative, is a good, although not necessarily simple, method of discerning how we are to apply the word.