35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Forced to reevaluate thanks to a bird, October 17, 2008
This review is from: The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Hardcover)
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.
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111 of 128 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Good and Helpful Book, October 9, 2008
This review is from: The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Hardcover)
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...
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53 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Blue Parakeets or Red Herrings, October 21, 2008
This review is from: The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Hardcover)
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.
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