Customer Reviews

the Blue Parakeet: Advanced Reader Copy - By: C. Kidd, 23 Oct 2008
Recently I was sent an advanced reader copy of the Blue Parakeet , & although I've been manically busy I finally managed to finish it last night. My initial reaction was I much preferred the second half of the book to the first half. Let me develop my htoughts on that.

Scot McKnight has written the book to challenge how we read the Bible, & especially, it seemed to me, how much of the Bible we take as literal rules forever & ever, & how much we try & discredit due to society & context. That concept is great - what is for 2008, & what was for 60CE - challenging the way we pick'n'mix our Bible passages.

The slightly random title: the Blue Parakeet comes from an eventin McKnight's garden. He enjoys bird watching, & one day was slightly surprised to see a blue parakeet alongside the other birdsin his garden one day. He describes how it represents those passages of scripture that we would rather ignore or avoid or putin to a tradition rather than truly engage with.

The first section of the book looks at `What is the Bible' & looks at how we read it & how we understand it. McKnight writes about how the Bible is a Wiki-Story:

"the ongoing reworking of the biblical Story by new authors so they can speak the old storyin new ways for their day"

It makes sense but the chapters that centred on that felt hard work & didn't really flow for me. The simply gist was that we should engage with the story, not with individual aspects, e.g. laws or blessings & promises. He summarises the Story as:

1. God & creation
2. Adam & Eve as Eikons who crack the Eikon
3. God's covenant community, where humans are restored to God, self, others, & the world
4. Jesus Christ, who is the Story &in whose story we are to live
5. the church as Jesus' covenant community
6. the consummation, when all the designs of our Creator God will finally be realized forever & ever

The book then picks up the pace as it looks at how we read the story, & how we apply the story. Here McKnight challenges us to:

"listen to God so we can can love him more deeply & love others more completely"

Certainly something I would want to highlight to the young people I work with.

The last section uses the role of womenin the church as a test-case. This was something I studied a reasonable amount when doing my Theology degree at Exeter University. This was where I got more excited about what McKnight was saying & doing (maybe that is more to do with me than the book - I like to ground theologyin application). He took the differing views of womenin the church & argued what the overall picture of the Bible is, & how we give more power to certain verses than the others. He works through the evidence (whilstin summary fashion due to the size of the book)in a very logical & clear way. He concludes that the difficult passages argue:

"silence only for women who have not yet been taught"

The book is a challenge to the way we lazily read the Bible, to the way we miss the big picture. The second half of the book was particularly helpfulin this & it reminded me of the challenges & discussionsin my New Testament Ethics module. Go get a copy of it, when it comes outin the UK & be challenged.