The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

Blue Parakeet The Scot McKnight has done us a great favour: a popularly accessible book which does a great job of helping ordinary Evangelicals get a hold of hermeneutics -that is it is helpful in getting us to think about how we interpret the Bible. What's the title about? -a story about a blue bird (I suspect what I'd call a budgie) appearing amongst the local 'usuals'. It's a picture of how something that is unusual or unexpected helps us to think about what we take for granted. It's about noticing things in scripture that don't fit into our usual 'tidy' take on what we think Scripture says. It's important to pay attention to the things that don't sit easily with our neat schemes or expectations so that we can let Scripture be scripture rather than just a mirror of our dreams.

There are some very helpful worked examples of reading and interpreting the Scriptures as you'll see in the latter quotes of those collected below.

I'd be keen to put this book into the hands of young Christians at university or professional Christians (ie those who are likely to read books).

Some quotes for flavour and interest.

believe there is an inner logic to our picking and choosing, but I believe we need to become aware of what it is. Until we do, we will be open to accusations of hypocrisy. It’s that simple, and it’s that lethal. 

Here are the six steps, leading to traditionalism: Step 1: We read the Bible. Step 2: We confront a current issue and we make a decision about an issue—like baptizing infants or adults—or we frame “what we believe” into a confession, a creed, or a doctrinal statement. Step 3: We fossilize our decision and it becomes a tradition. (Somewhere around here we become absolutely convinced our tradition is a perfect interpretation of the Bible.) Step 4: We are bound to our tradition forever. (It is now traditionalism.) Step 5: We are bound to read the Bible through our tradition. (Somewhere around here we become convinced that God’s Spirit led us to our tradition and that it is nothing less than an accurate, God-prompted, don’t-question-it unfolding in history of what God’s Word says.) Step 6: Those who question our tradition are suspect or, worse yet, kicked out of our church. (Somewhere around here we become ineffective in our world and become increasingly cantankerous about how the youth are wandering away from the faith.) location 435

 

"I am,” I told her, “a Willopalian.” I believe in the importance of a commitment both to the Great Tradition and to ongoing creative renewal we find in places like Willow Creek 497

Three words tell us how to read the Bible and we will devote a section to each: Story Listening Discerning That’s all we need to know. It’s all in those three words.      location524

For some, the Bible is massive collection of laws—what to do and what not to do.  location 587

God becomes the Law-God, usually a little ticked off and impatient. Our relationship to God becomes conditioned by whether we are good citizens. There’s another ugly element to the mistake of making the Bible a law book: what it does to us. We, the Obedient Ones, become insufferable.     Location 591

we need to observe what versification did to how we read the Bible. Dividing the Bible up into verses turns the Bible into morsels and leads us to read the Bible as a collection of divine morsels, sanctified morsels of truth.  location 619

Random verses, with blessing on top of blessing or promise on top of promise. (No one has yet composed a Wrath of God Calendar of Warnings,     location 629

Some people read the Bible as if its passages were Rorschach inkblots. They see what is in their head. In more sophisticated language, they project onto the Bible what they want to see.   location 658

even though we like to think we are becoming more like Jesus, the reverse is probably more the case: we try to make Jesus like ourselves.    location 667

Puzzlers belong to what I call the Flat Bible Society. They work in a flat room, and they’ve scattered throughout the room these random puzzle bits of information from the Bible. If you pick up the right piece first and gradually work your way through every verse (the pieces of the puzzle) of the whole Bible, you will eventually get your Bible’s puzzle pieces to look like the picture on the box … but that’s the problem. We don’t really know what the picture looks like. We have to imagine what the original picture was.    location 687

why do we try to pull together all the authors of the Bible? Who ever told us that was the way to read the Bible? Some might say, “But the Bible is a unity because God is behind it all.” I agree, but who says that our system is that unity?    location 714

[Jesus is] eclipsed by many Bible readers by Maestro Paul. In this shortcut, Jesus is either ignored or overwhelmed by Paul’s way of thinking. Some of us grew up in churches where the thought patterns, the lenses, the grid through which everything was filtered—however unconsciously—was the book of Romans or Paul’s theology. location 747

had been nurtured in a world that read the entire Bible as a solved puzzle that used Maestro Paul’s categories to understand everything else in the Bible. location 756

I believe those seven words are the secret to reading the Bible: “that was then and this is now.” They reveal that we have learned to read the Bible as Story, even though most of us never give this a minute’s thought.  location 800

we think about how people treat or read the Bible, and we think back to our third chapter where we talked about shortcuts, we might find ourselves in an interesting conversation. It seems to me that here is where some folks would shelve the Bible in a library: Lawbook: Blessings/promises 320 (Political science) → 340 (Law) for the day: 150 (Psychology) → 158 (Applied) Rorschach: 158 (Applied psychology) or 126 (The self) Puzzle: 110 (Metaphysics) or 120 (Epistemology) Maestro: 227.06 (Paul) or 232.092 (Jesus Christ) Each of these locations on the shelves of the library tells us something true about the Bible. In fact, it is amazing how many locations could contain Bibles! Apart from its obvious location with Religion, the Bible properly belongs with History of the Ancient World, Palestine/Israel (933), and also in the Life of Jesus (232.092); and because the gospel spreads from the land of Israel throughout the whole world, it could also be moved to World History (909). But there’s one element about the Bible that makes the DDS inadequate: the Bible claims to be God’s telling of history. The Bible is the story of God’s people. It is “his” story, and I doubt any library wants to assign a number to “God’s Story”! location 811

I’d say the Bible contains an ongoing series of midrashes, or interpretive retellings, of the one Story God wants us to know and hear. location 918

In brief, the point of Genesis 1–2 is this: God wanted The Adam to enjoy what the Trinity had eternally enjoyed and what the Trinity continues to enjoy: perfect communion and mutuality with an equal.  location 997

The Bible’s story has a plot headed in the direction of a person. And that same story is headed in the direction of a community “in” that person. Everything God designed for Eikons is actually lived out by Jesus. Everything Eikons are to do comes by being “in Christ” or by becoming “one” with Jesus Christ.  location 1104

As a college student one of my favorite chapters of the Bible was Psalm 119. Why? Because the psalmist and I shared something: we both loved God’s Word, and we both loved to study its words. But the psalmist’s approach to his Bible—and you can just sit down and read 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.” The difference between these two approaches is enormous. One of them is a relationship to the Bible; the other is a relationship with God.  location 1213

If you read Deuteronomy and then read Job—I know, that is not a typical evening’s reading—you observe that Job is engaging Deuteronomy in a serious conversation. Yes, Job says to Moses, there is a correlation between obedience and blessing, but there is more to it than that. Job learned, and God reveals to us, that sometimes God is at work outside the correlation of obedience and blessing. location 1305

Jacobs call this Christian understanding of words “the hermeneutics of love.” “The hermeneutics of love requires that books and authors … be understood and treated as neighbors.”3 This means that when our neighbors speak, we listen. Love listens. location 1445

Paul, too, knew the Bible was designed to be “useful.” “All Scripture,” he says, “is God-breathed and is useful for …” (2 Timothy 3:16, emphasis added). Missional listeners discover we are in a process of being transformed from what we are into what God wants us to be. Here’s the process: we become informed; we get rebuked; we are restored; and we become instructed in righteousness. If we are committed to missional listening to God as we read the Bible, we will learn, we will be rebuked about our failures, we will be restored, and—now to use borrow language from our educrats—we will get “outcomed.” location 1667

How can we take a Bible that forbids sex outside of marriage, that was written in a time where there was little or no time that passed between sexual maturity and marriage, and apply it to today’s situation? I see this as a significant challenge in ministering to the emerging generation, and I don’t see it discussed much. location 1807

my belief that we—the church—have always read the Bible in a picking-and-choosing way. Somehow, someway we have formed patterns of discernment that guide us.  location 1859

is no doubt safer to call this “adapt and adopt.”  location 1861

—every major denomination in the world prior to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries recited the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday. Why? Because Luke 11:2 taught them to do this. location 1887

But here’s a question to think about: What would the gospel look like—in a four-point gospel tract—if we took the “abandon riches” call into the kingdom as the framework? How about this? Point 1: God created the world for all of us. Point 2: Some out of greed have established systemic injustices. Point 3: Jesus calls us to abandon all of our riches to rectify this. Point 4: If you abandon your riches, the kingdom will come and the world will be what God wants. Most in the history of the church don’t think that such a four-point gospel tract expresses the gospel.  location 1914

more literal, take-it-all-or-nothing approach, but I’m guessing most of you are now becoming aware that you do in fact adopt and adapt. What we must now discover is this: What principles do we use to adopt and adapt the Bible?  location 1952

The pattern of discernment is simply this: as we read the Bible and locate each item in its place in the Story, as we listen to God speak to us in our world through God’s ancient Word, we discern—through God’s Spirit and in the context of our community of faith—a pattern of how to live in our world.  location 1965

churches are called to enact similar discernments today, and long, hard, prayerful sessions have been directed at discerning whether abuse and desertion and immaturities are permissible grounds for divorce even among Christians. This is the messy part. No one says it is easy, but we have the following confidences: the guidance of the Spirit is promised us as we pray, as we study Scripture, and as we join in the conversation with church tradition.  location 2011

James, brother of Jesus and now leader of the church in Jerusalem, came to the conclusion that Gentile converts were like “resident aliens” and needed only to offer a minimal respect for those commandments that had always distinguished the Jews from the surrounding nations (15:16–21). Here we find a pattern of discernment, a pattern of listening to the old, understanding the present, and discerning how to live that old way in a new day.  location 2050

But … what was decided in Jerusalem wasn’t enough for Paul, who developed his own pattern of discernment for his churches. In fact, Paul went further than James  location 2053

Paul’s opponents knew with certainty that Paul was disagreeing with God’s Word!  location 2058

Why do we not follow these explicit words of the apostle Peter? The only answer I can give is that over time the church has worked out a pattern of discernment that comes to this: women (and men I might add) should dress modestly.  location 2100

What this book is advocating is not new. It is my belief that most Christians and churches do operate with a pattern of discernment, but it is rarely openly admitted and even more rarely clarified. Discernment, I am arguing, is how we have always read the Bible; in fact, it is how the biblical authors themselves read the Bible they had!  location 2217

illustrate what it means to read the Bible with tradition instead of reading the Bible through tradition. In essence, I think the church has gotten off track, misread some passages in the Bible, ignored others, and then fossilized that reading of the Bible into the Great Tradition. While I respect that tradition, I have learned that reading the Bible with tradition encourages each generation to think for itself by returning to the Bible, confessing the Bible’s primacy, and unleashing  location 2225

the power of the gospel in our day in our way.  location 2229

anyone who thinks it is wrong for a woman to teach in a church can be consistent with that point of view only if they refuse to read and learn from women scholars. This means not reading their books lest they become teachers. location 2285

At this point, all we need to grant is that there are—at a minimum—women who were exceptions to dominant cultural perception of women as inferior. They were exceptions whom God raised above the norm in order to accomplish his will. I will go beyond the word “exception” in what follows, but for now we can ask if we are permitting women exceptions in our churches. I know many who believe there should be no exceptions—and they are caging and silencing even the exceptional blue parakeet.  location 2510

some believe the silencing passages should control the WDWD passages.  location 2925

bad name to the gospel, so he asked them to wear head coverings; by contrast, demanding women to wear head coverings in our world may do the very same damage to the gospel.  location 3078

major clue to reading 1 Timothy 2 is found in the very same letter—in 1 Timothy 5. location 3109

Of particular concern to Paul was a group of young widows whom we meet directly in 1 Timothy 5:11–14.  location 3112

When Paul silences women in 1 Timothy 2, he is almost certainly silencing especially the widows we find in chapter 5, location 3113

1 Timothy 5 is referring to young widows who, because they are not yet theologically formed, are being accused by Paul of idling and busybodying. What they were doing—visiting friends—is not Paul’s concern. What they were saying and teaching was Paul’s concern. location 3128

when Paul asks women to be silent in 1 Timothy 2, he is not talking about ordinary Christian women; rather, he has a specific group of women in mind. His concern is with some untrained, morally loose, young widows, who, because they are theologically unformed, are teaching unorthodox ideas. Paul does not advocate, then, that women should not teach but that they should learn sound theology before they teach. location 3142

when Paul says they need to “learn in quietness and full submission,” he is speaking here of deference to the wise teachers, the elders, who are orthodox and godly, not to a permanent condition of utter silence.  location 3159

this caution: “What this means for Christianity in traditional Asian or Muslim contexts is that too much too fast could endanger the church’s witness and credibility. But in much of the Western world, too little too slow could neutralize the church’s impact in society just as effectively.” location 3190

No, it won’t lead to millions of readings, but it will lead to many readings. Culturally shaped readings of the Bible and culturally shaped expressions of the gospel are exactly what Paul did and wanted. That’s exactly what Peter and Hebrews and John and James and the others were doing. Culturally shaped readings and expressions of the gospel are the way it has been, is, and always will be. In fact, I believe that gospel adaptation for every culture, for every church, and for every Christian is precisely why God gave us the Bible. The Bible shows us how.  location 3215

“Professor Bruce, what do you think of women’s ordination?” “I don’t think the New Testament talks about ordination,” he replied. “What about the silencing passages of Paul on women?” I asked. “I think Paul would roll over in his grave if he knew we were turning his letters into torah.” location 3232

Blue parakeet passages are oddities in the Bible that we prefer to cage and silence rather than to permit into our sacred mental gardens. If we are honest, blue parakeet passages often threaten us, call into question our traditional way of reading the Bible, and summon us back to the Bible to rethink how we read the Bible.
Amazon Kindle: The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible