| Plot | Theme |
| Creating Eikons (Genesis 1-2) | Oneness |
| Cracked Eikons (Genesis 3-11) | Otherness |
| Covenant Community (Genesis 12 – Malachi) | Otherness Expands |
| Christ, the Perfect Eikon, redeems (Matthew-Revelation 20) | One in Christ |
| Consummation (Revelation 21-22) | Perfectly One |
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Publications Book Reviews Name of the Book: The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible
Publications Book Reviews Name of the Book: The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible
Name of the Book: The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible
Name of the Book: The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the BibleAuthor: Scot McKnightPublishers: Grand Rapids: ZondervanYear of Publication: 2008Pages: 236Reviewed by: J.N. ManokaranScot McKnight has written a wonderful book that provides fresh insights to read the Bible. The book has been written well that would appeal to Postmodern generation. The book is a must for every Christian leader, especially for those working among young people. There are three ways of reading the bible: 1) Reading to retrieve 2) Reading through tradition and 3) Reading with tradition. Some people read the bible to retrieve. There are two kinds of ‘return and retrieve’ readers – some try to retrieve all of it and some admit we can retrieve only what can be salvaged. If we sit down and think about it, it is impossible to live a first-century life in a twenty-first century world. The danger in ‘retrieving the essence’ is there can be too little adoption or application. The result is there is not enough faithfulness and consistency with the Bible itself. Throughout the Western world: it seems too often that everybody reads the Bible for herself or for himself, and everybody does what’s right in her or his own eyes. According to the author; there are three groups: Pastors have come up with their own pet theory for how to read the Bible that no one in the history of the church has ever seen. Books and Catalogs cross my desk daily with new ideas, and often they are advertised as an idea that’s fresh, insightful, never-been-seen-before-but-straight-from-the-Bible, yada yada yada. Engaging with Christian Bible readers over the years leads me to the third group: God bless ‘em, but some folks see some of the goofiest things in the Bible, and I wish I could just blow Holy-Spirit-air on them and cure them of their silliness. There are two senses of tradition here, one that is good and strongly recommended is: Great Tradition and one that repels people is traditionalism. The first is the Great Tradition. The Great Tradition is how the Church everywhere has always read the Bible. That is, we may learn to read the Bible for ourselves, but we must be responsible to what the church has always believed. We can reduce the Great Tradition to the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’’ Creed, and the importance of justification by faith from the Reformation. These creeds point us to what God has led the church to see as its most important doctrines. Traditionalism is the inflexible, don’t-ask-questions, do-it-the-way-it-has-always-been-done approach to Bible reading. It reads the Bible through tradition. What happens then? Those who read the Bible through tradition always use the traditional way of reading the Bible. This approach is nearly incapable of renewal and adaptation. Reading the Bible so we can live it out today means being on the move-always. Anyone who stops and wants to turn a particular moment into a monument, as the disciples did when Jesus was transfigured before them, will soon be wondering where God has gone. In the sixteenth century the citizens of the Italian city of Lucca in Tuscany were so security conscious and were threatened by the mighty nobles of Pisa and Florence. They built one-hundred-foot-wide walls for more than a century with 30 per cent or more taxes. The irony is that neither the Florentines nor the Pisans ever attacked Lucca. In 1812 the flood was kept at bay. Now tourists walk around the wall. The wall might illustrate what happens when we convert the genius of a generation into fossilized, inflexible tradition…It is like reading the Bible through tradition. “The Bible’s story, in the simplest of categories, has a plot with a: Beginning (Genesis 1-11), and a (long, long) Middle (Genesis 12 – Malachi 4; Matthew – Revelation), and as End (Matthew 25: Romans 8: Revelation 21-22).Shortcuts in Bible reading affect our spiritual health. Here are five shortcuts: 1) Morsels of Law, 2) Morsels of blessings and promises 3) Mirrors and Inkblots 4) Puzzling together the pieces to map God’s mind and 5) Maestros. For some, the Bible is massive collection of laws – what to do and what not to do. When Bible is just seen as law book: the readers get intoxicated with our own moral superiority, become more concerned with being right than being good and become judgmental. Others see only blessing and promises and how to claim it for their lives. Some like to mould the Bible to their own image. Those who solve the puzzle think they’ve got the Bible mastered; they have caged and tamed the Blue Parakeet who gave the blue parakeets. God did not give the Bible so we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it. The moment we think we’ve mastered it, we have failed to be readers of the Bible. The author calls the Bible a Wiki-Story: the ongoing reworking of the biblical story by new authors so they can speak the old story in new ways for their day. In other words: The Bible is a Story; The Story is made up of a series of wiki-stories; The wiki-stories are held together by the Story; The only way to make sense of the blue parakeets in the Bible is to set each in the context of the Bible’s story. None of the wiki-stories is final; none of them is comprehensive; none of them is absolute; none of them is exhaustive. Each of them tells a true story of that Story. The Bible is Story because: it has a plot (Creation to consummation), it has characters (God – Father, Son, and Spirit – and God’s people and the world and creation around them), and it has many authors who together tell the story. The elements of the plot in the Story revolve around five themes, which hold the Bible together.
Nothing in the Bible makes sense if one does not begin with the Garden of Eden as a life of oneness-human beings in union with God, and in communion with oneself, with one another, and with the world around them. Life is about ‘oneness’-oneness with God, with ourselves, with others, and with the world. When this oneness is lived out, God is glorified and human delight in that glory. Woven into this story is a deep thread of failure that creates otherness. How to resolve the deep thread of failure drives the story onward. God accomplishes four important things in Christ: Incarnation, Death, Resurrection and Pentecost. The most decisive impact of Pentecost, where the gift of the Spirit is made clear, is not tongue-speaking but community-formation (oneness). Psalmist’s portrays right approach to the Bible – it is not expressed like this: ‘Your words are authoritative, and I am called to submit to them.’ Instead, his approach is more like this: ‘Your words are delightful and I love to do what you ask.’ There is vast difference in the attitude and approaches. One of them is just a relationship to the Bible; the other is relationship with God. The relational approach turns the Bible from facts-only to fact-that-lead-to-engagement with the God of the Bible. Listening and loving, are connected. The word ‘hear’ or ‘listen’ in the Bible operates on at least three levels (I will provide my own translations): attention, absorption and action. When we read the Bible as Story and develop a relationship with the God of the Bible, · We learn to listen to and for God in the Bible as we read it:· We are attentive enough to recognize God’s voice and let it in; · We absorb what God says so that it floods our inner being; and · We act on what we have heard from God.”Missional Listening:1. Missional Listening begins with the wisdom of ages2. Missional listening is empowered by inspiration3. Missional listening is a process4. Missional listening blossoms into a Life of Good works.”Education is not information; it is also formation. Education and training in righteousness and in good works. We are called…to learn the Plot and the Story, to listen to God, and to discern what to say and how to live in our day in our own way. The author provides a model of reading Bible with regards to women’s leadership role in the church which is excellent. The author provides a new vision to read the bible, provides a new concept or idea to read the Scripture. He could have provided new tools also to help people to listen and discern to God. It is good book for younger generation Christians.
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