The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible by Scot McKnight - Best Popular Level Book on the Topic

The Blue Parakeet is author Scot McKnightâ??s deeply reasoned, compelling statement of how to read the Bible in a new evangelical generation. In re-examining the Bible, McKnight provides an exciting â??Third Wayâ? that appeals to the millions in todayâ??s church who long to be authentic Christians, but donâ??t consider themselves theologically conservative or liberal.

Best Popular Level Book on the Topic
The folks over at Zondervan were kind enough to send me a copy of The Blue Parakeet (2008) by Scot McKnight quite a while ago. However, the pressures of the semester drowned it out in Matthew 13 fashion, and so I'm just now getting to it. (All page numbers taken from an advanced reader copy.)

By way of introduction, the title refers to a phenomenon the McKnight witnessed in his backyard: a blue parakeet disrupting a group of sparrows. At first the sparrows were afraid, but eventually they became accustomed to the blue parakeet and let it just be.... a blue parakeet. Thus, this book is an attempt to offer a means of dealing with blue parakeets in the Bible, difficult passages, and how to live them out today.

This book, which is essentially about reading and interpreting the bible in a postmodern age, totals out at 239 pages, sadly it has endnotes rather than footnotes. However, it is intended for a popular audience so I can see why Zondervan would have requested it. The book is split into four parts, including an introduction and five helpful appendixes. A PDF of the table of contents, along with the first sixteen pages, can be found here.

In the introduction, McKnight articulates his vision for reading the Bible. He distills the multifarious hermeneutical approaches out there into two essential models: (1) Reading the Bible apart from tradition; and (2) Reading the Bible through tradition. After offering a critique of these, he then presents his own view, which is to read the Bible with tradition. This view, McKnight maintains, recognizes the value of tradition while still allowing the Bible to critique or even correct tradition.

In the first three parts, comprised of a total of ten chapters, McKnight demonstrates his model of reading the Bible with tradition by answering the following questions:

What is the Bible? (pp. 41-82)
What do I do with the Bible? (pp. 83-114)
How do I benefit from the Bible? (pp. 115-152)
The rest of the book represents McKnight's attempt to demonstrate this method via one of the Bible's "blue parakeets": Women in Church Ministries Today.

Though he doesn't refer to it as such, McKnight essentially opts for a redemptive-movement hermeneutic, though his approach is slightly different. Rather than looking at the issue negatively ("How were women treated `back then'?"), he asks the question positively ("What did women do `back then'?"). First he surveys what women did in the OT, then in the NT, and only then does he deal with the anomalous passages which silence women.

His approach is to be commended, as is his overall tone throughout his treatment of the topic. He lets the readers into to his own personal struggles with this topic and invites us to watch the evolution of his views. This alone, in my opinion is worth the price of the book. It was encouraging to find so much in common with his personal journey on the topic.

What view does he take? I won't tell you! You'll just have to read the book to find out. ; )

My critiques of the book are minimal. I would have liked to see more, perhaps, on the issue of how our own experience colors the way we read the Bible, just as the experience of the original authors colored the way they wrote it. However, this is a minor gripe. Some readers, those who are looking for a more academic treatment of the topic of how to understand what might be called "the inculturation of the Bible", will find this book lacking in a detailed dialogue with other viewpoints. However, McKnight makes clear up front that this is not his purpose here. Those readers would do well to check out Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis by William Webb (InterVarsity Press, 2001), which offers a more comprehensive and more academic treatment.

Overall, I highly recommend this book for people, with or without seminary training, interested in how to read the Bible as Scripture and who are interested in understanding it as a group of documents that are highly contextualized

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