The Blue Parakeet: Chapter 3

Part 1 – Story: What is the Bible?

Chapter 3 – Inkblots and Puzzles: How, Then, Are We Reading?

The goal of this chapter is to get the reader to allow him/herself to be drawn into the story of the Bible. 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 an

End (Matthew 25; Romans 8; Revelation 21-22).

Scot has noticed that we do not read the Bible as a story. Our intent is to get something out of the Bible for our daily lives (and that is a good goal). But, because the reading the Bible as story takes more time, thinking and discerning, we’ve developed routines and techniques that get us to our goal sooner. We’ve settled for shortcuts. Scot has identified five shortcuts:

Shortcut 1: Morsels of Law – for some, the Bible is massive collection of laws – what to do and what not to do. There is an ugly element to the mistake of making the Bible a law book: what it does to us. We, the Obedient Ones, become insufferable. How so? We…

become intoxicated with our own moral superiority

become more concerned with being right than being good

become judgmental.

There is an important place for the Bible’s laws. If you read Psalm 119 in one sitting, you will find someone who found utter delight in the Lawgiver. The laws were not a burden but the good revelation of God on how to walk in this world with God in such a way that it would lead to the blessing of God. Converting the Bible into a collection of little more that commandments completely distorts the Bible.

Shortcut 2: Morsels of Blessings and Promises

Dividing the Bible into chapters and verses has a great benefit when it comes to being able to refer passages in the Bible. It does make it more difficult to read a story that way. 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. We pause for each one to see if we can get something from it.

What happens to the Christian who reads the Bible, day after day and week after week, as little more than a collection of morsels of blessings and promises? For one, everything is good and wonderful and light and airy. These people become optimistic and upbeat and wear big smiles…until something happens, until they enter into a period of suffering and feel distant from God.

One of the most important things about the Bible is that it tells realistic truth. There are all kinds of wonderful blessings surrounding the characters, there also were days of doubt, defeat, disobedience and darkness. The blessings and promises of God emerge from a real life’s story that also knows that we live in a broken world.

Shortcut 3: Mirrors and Inkblots

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. People will begin to read the Bible with an eye to what is important to them. For example, they might see in the “Jesus inkblot” a Republican or a socialist, because they are Republicans or socialists. After surveying his students for years, he finds that everyone thinks Jesus is like them, we all project onto Jesus our own image.

Shortcut 4: Puzzling Together the Pieces to Map God’s Mind

For some, the Bible is like a big puzzle. Once you’ve got the puzzle solved, you no longer have to work with the pieces. The problem is first, we need to think about what this Grand System, the solved puzzle, really is: it is a system of thought that presumes that we know what God was doing behind the Bible before the Bible was written, and once we have this puzzle in hand we’ve got the Bible figured out. We think we’ve even mapped the mind God at some level.

Second, this approach often ignores the parts of the puzzle that don’t fit. All groups seem to emphasize something true and important in the Bible; you will also see that each one de-emphasizes or even ignores something important to other groups. Each of these groups ignores parts of the puzzle that don’t quite fit their system.

Third, puzzling together the pieces we find in the Bible into a system is impossible. We may say that the Bible is a unity because God is behind it all, and that is true. But who says that our system is that unity?

Fourth, puzzling calls into question the Bible as we have it. Had he wanted to, God could have revealed a systematic theology chapter by chapter. What God chose to do was provide a story of Israel and the church.

The problem is that those who “solve” the puzzle think they’ve got the Bible mastered; they tamed the Blue Parakeet who gave us 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.

Shortcut 5: Maestros

We look to the Bible to find the great truths by looking to the great teachers and personas of the Bible to find the ultimate truth. We are of course tempted to look at the Bible through the lens of the Maestro Jesus. We read the Bible and seek to imitate Maestro Jesus. “What would Jesus do?” is the only question they ask. The problem here is the work “only”. Some, on the other hand, read the Bible through Maestro Paul who unconsciously has eclipsed Maestro Jesus. Many of us, as conservative evangelicals, have read the Bible (and even interpret Jesus’ words) through the lens of Maestro Paul. Reading the Bible through a maestro’s eyes (even Jesus’) gives us one chapter in the story of the Bible. One-chapter Bible readers develop one-chapter Christian lives.

Now that the shortcuts have been pointed out, what is the long way? How can we learn to read the Bible as Story? That leads us to the next chapter.

Random Thoughts

Post have been few this week. I have been at Support Raising School in KC. I have been learning the various aspects of raising support to fund your ministry. It has been eye opening. I had no idea how much time and effort went into raising support. But that hasn't stopped me from thinking of a few quick hits:

If you don't want me to ruin your football watching experience, stop reading. Here goes, It drives me crazy when I hear referees announce a false start penalty. They are redundant in their calls. It always starts, "Prior to the snap, false start on the offense, five yard penalty...." You cannot have a false start AFTER the snap. By its very definition, a false start naturally happens prior to the snap.

Another thing, it drives me crazy when blowhard ESPN analysts and radio talk show hosts refer to the NFL as the NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE. Ron Jaworski from Monday Night Football is the worst offender, followed closely by Mike Greenberg of "Mike and Mike." Everybody does it, Mark Schlereth does it alot too. Why not just the NFL or "you can't expect to survive in this league" instead of constantly saying "THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE." You don' t hear guys calling the NBA the National Basketball Association do you. Pompous blowhards.

Plus, why is it that when I'm on offense, all I need to do is break the plane of the endzone without putting my foot down in the endzone for it to be a touchdown but on a punt, I can jump in the air three yards deep, grab the ball and throw it back out of the endzone and it is not considered a touchback. Didn't I break the plane holding on to the ball?

Anyway, enjoy week four of the NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE.

Blue Parakeet - Chapter 2: The Birds and I

The Birds and I
This chapter is the one that explains the title and has a section where Scot suggests there are three ways to approach the Bible. Scot admits that there are actually more than three ways, but he has chosen these to keep the ways simple in order to see the alternatives more starkly.

1. Reading to Retrieve - that is we return to the times of the Bible in order to retrieve biblical ideas and practices for today. Some people try to retrieve all of certain ideas and practices when some only retrieve what they feel can be salvaged. Yet Scot acknowledges that it is impossible to live a first century life in a twenty first century world. Scot believes it is undesirable and unbiblical to retrieve it all, Paul didn’t even do that. He refers to 1 Cor. 9.19-23 where Paul says his strategy is one of constant adaptation. If Paul was already adapting first century Jewish ideas to first century Gentile situations, can we expect to do anything else? Paul would not have thought of returning and retrieving everything from Moses’ day, why would we do the same.
Scot states that what we’ve go in the pages of the NT are first century expressions of the gospel and church life, not permanent, timeless expressions. They are Spirit-inspired, but they were and remain first century expressions. We aren’t called to live first century lives in the twenty first century, but “twenty-first century lives as we walk in the light of the revelation God gave to us in the first century” (27).
Those Days, Those Ways – in this subsection of this ways to read the Bible, Scot reveals one of the themes of the book. Basically, God spoke in Moses’ day in Moses’ ways and/God spoke in David’s days in David’s ways, and/God spoke in Jesus’ days in Jesus’ ways and/god spoke in Paul’s days in Paul’s ways/and “we are called to carry on that pattern in our world today.
What we need is not a return to the first century (or even fourth or sixteenth centuries or eighteenth centuries) but a fresh blowing of God’s Spirit on our culture, in our day, and in our ways. We need twenty first century Christians living out the biblical gospel in twenty first century ways. God never asked one generation in the Bible to step back in time and live the way it had done before. God instead spoke in each generation in that generation’s ways.
The biblical way of retrieving the material of the Bible is not returning to retrieve it all, but it is the ongoing adoption of the past and adaptation to new conditions and to do this in a way that is consistent with and faithful to the Bible.

2. Reading through Tradition – the basic point of this section is: ordinary people need to learn to read the Bible through tradition or they will misread the Bible and create schisms in the church. What we see is often everybody reads the Bible for herself or himself, and everybody does what’s right in her or his own eyes. What we often find out is that not every Bible interpretation is equal.
Scot is saying that we are all called to read the Bible for ourselves, but not entirely on our own. It was the great Reformers who championed the idea of putting the Bible in the hands of ordinary Christians. But the plan of Reformers like John Calvin was not to just give people Bibles and say, “Here, read this! Tell me what you think!” He wanted them to learn the Bible right and to do that they would have to learn some basic theology. We should learn from the Reformers who wanted to provide the readers with a sound method and theology that would lead them to read the Bible accurately. Scot identifies The Great Tradition as the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, and the importance of justification by faith from the Reformation. These creeds point us toward the non-negotiables of the faith.
There is a danger to this, which is giving too much authority to tradition or traditionalism. Traditionalism is the inflexible, don’t ask questions, do it the way it has always been done approach to Bible reading.
Scot notes that the Bible itself points us away from traditionalism. The biblical authors and the early fathers didn’t fossilize traditions. Instead – and Scot calls this a major moment in the book – they went back to the Bible so they could come forward into the present.
Scot closes this section looking for a way of reading the Bible that returns to retrieve concepts from the Bible which also respects the Great Tradition. He believes there is, and it is the way of ongoing and constant renewal that returns, retrieves and renews by reading the Bible with the Great Tradition.

3. Reading with Tradition – So, how can we read the Bible that is both a “return and retrieval” reading as well as being respectful of the Great Tradition? He suggests we learn to read the Bible with the Great Tradition. We dare not ignore what God has said to the church through the ages (as the return and retrieval folks do), nor dare we fossilize past interpretations into traditionalism. Instead, we need to go back to the Bible so we can move forward through the church and speak God’s Word in our days in our ways. We need to go back without getting stuck (the return problem), and we need to move forward without fossilizing our ideas (traditionalism). We want to walk between these two approaches.
Scot asks, is this dangerous? Sure, it can easily turn into hyper-innovation. We can avoid this by having a profound respect for our past without giving it the final authority. The final decision should always rest with the Scripture.
Renewal carries forward God’s timeless and historic message in a timely and cultured way for our day. The Bible spoke timeless truth in a contemporary manner in the times that it was written. Our task is to let the Bible speak its timeless truths in our time in a contemporary manner.

A Trip Back in Time: 20 years ago

This takes me back twenty years. I used to work for the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team in college. After the games I would listen to Jack Buck do the Scoreboard show and help the engineer of the radio broadcast (Colin Jarrett) break down the equipment and put stuff away. While we were doing that, Ernie Hays would be playing bossa nova standards as people were leaving the stadium. Below is a youtube video of one of the songs that Ernie would play. Ernie played it almost just like Walter Wanderly who is featured in the video. If you ever stayed around the stadium while Ernie played (or maybe heard this in the background during the Scoreboard show), this will be fun for you. If not, you will probably hate it.

The Blue Parakeet: Chapter 1

Scot begins the book by recounting his call to in depth study of the Bible and eventually his call to teach the Bible as a vocation. In the midst of Scot’s study of the Bible, he made discoveries that created question that disturbed him (and still does). As he began to study and examine the claims of the well worn mantra “God said it, I believe it, that settles it for me!” Scot observed a disconnect. Well meaning Christians were saying two things,

One: we believe everything the Bible says, therefore…

Two: we practice whatever the Bible says.

Scot’s reply was “Hogwash!”

What he observed instead was that we all pick and choose what we practice and that nobody, himself included practices all that the Bible says. This led him to one big question: “How, then, are we to live out the Bible today?”

Scot then looks at James 1.26-27, where James describes pure and faultless religion. For James, a pure Christian was one who showed compassion to orphans and widows and avoided being polluted by sin at all costs. Now, most conservative Christians that he has known emphasized not being polluted by sin, but they defined “polluted” in ways that had nothing to do with compassion for the marginalized and suffering. Polluted by sin was defined as going to the movies, drinking alcohol and sex before marriage. If one could stay clear of these things, then you were a good, solid Christian. These may not be bad things, but they hardly fulfill the prescription of pure religion described by James.

Scot began to ask, “How in the world were we reading the same Bible?” We were not following the plain words of James. Every one of us adopts the Bible and (at the same time) adapts the Bible to our culture. Everyone picks and chooses. But why do we pick and choose what to follow and what not to follow in the Bible? More importantly, how can we pick and choose “in a way that honors God and embraces the Bible as God’s Word for all times”?

Picking and Choosing

Scot gives a few examples of how we pick and choose what to follow in the Bible:

Sabbath – Sabbath observance was instituted in the Bible. It meant not working from Friday night to Saturday night (Ex. 20.9-10). This practice was even observed by some NT Christians but not really practiced by anyone he knew. What he was learning was that we sometimes, rightly or wrongly, live out the Bible by not doing something in the Bible.

Tithing – The Bible taught tithing, but the Bible does not insist that all of the tithe must go to a local church (storehouse tithing in some circles). The NT doesn’t even bring up the tithe. In the Bible the tithe is a combination of spiritual support (for the temple) and social service (for the poor, see Deut. 26.12). The tithe has instead become support for the local church building, ministers’ salaries, missionaries etc. Scot calls this morphing, that is, we took a tithe for temple assistants and also for the poor and turned it into a tithe for the local church.

Foot Washing – Jesus explicitly commanded foot washing in John 13.14. Widows performed this task (according to 1 Tim. 5.10) and Augustine writes about the practice of Christians washing the feet of the freshly baptized over three hundred years later. While some Christians still practice this, no one he knew was doing it. Thus, most of us were either ignoring what the Bible taught or morphed it into a cultural parallel (like offering hospitality). What he learned is that sometimes we “look behind the text to grasp a timeless principle and the principle is more important than doing the actual words” (15).

Charismatic Gifts – As we read 1 Corinthians 14, we find notes that Christians in Paul’s churches gave words of prophecy or had gifts of healing or spoke in tongues. No one he knew was doing any of these things (although there is a segment of believers who do), thus he learned from this experience that some read the Bible with a “that was then, but this is now” attitude.

Surrendering Possessions – There is nothing clearer than this statement by Jesus about possessions: “In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples” (Luke 14.33 also see 12.33). Very few were applying these verses literally. These verses evidently belonged to a different era and a different culture. Perhaps they were reserved for Jesus’ personal disciples? How did we decide such things? How do we know what to do and what not to do?

The Question is “How?”

How do we come to the answers we have for such issues? Why is it that two of us can sit down with the same Bible with the same questions and come away with two different answers? Scot discovered that it is not as easy to “apply” the Bible as he thought it is. How we read the Bible discerns how we are to live. There was plenty of picking and choosing on both sides of every question. That brought Scot to the vital question – How, then, are we to live out the Bible today? We don’t want to admit that we are picking and choosing. Scot believes it is time to think about why and how we pick what we pick and why and how we choose what we choose. What can we do to get ourselves to face this question honestly?

Book Review: The Blue Parakeet by Scot McKnight

I received an advance reader’s copy of Scot McKnight’s new book, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible this past weekend. They were sending copies to bloggers who would be willing to review the book. I was interested I reading the book anyway so I submitted my blog and received a copy.

Scot McKnight is a professor in Religious Studies at North Park University in Chicago. He was an editor of the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels as well as the author of the NIV Application Commentary volume on Galatians and books such as The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others; The Real Mary: Why Evangelicals Can Embrace the Mother of Jesus; Jesus and His Death: Historiography, the Historical Jesus, and Atonement Theory; and A Community Called Atonement (Living Theology), co-authored with Tony Jones.

Scot’s purpose of writing this book is to ask – in our postmodern society that has been open to deconstruction – “How do we now approach the Bible? What does it mean to speak of reading the Bible as Story, of learning to “listen” to the Bible, and of how to discern a pattern for living today?”

The title comes from an episode of bird watching in Scot’s backyard. He noticed an unusual blue bird which turned out to be a blue parakeet, probably a former pet that escaped from its cage. He observed how this interloper interacted with the normal visitors to the McKnight bird feeder. The sparrows who were regulars in the yard, at first seemed afraid of the parakeet, but eventually they adjusted to it and even adapted to some of the parakeet’s behavior. They let the blue parakeet be a blue parakeet instead of making it conform to their routine. The sparrows may have thought they had adjusted to the new bird, but every now and then the blue parakeet did something that frightened the sparrows. Even though it was formerly a caged pet, it was not tame.

Scot compares some of the more disturbing (to him) Bible passages and biblical quandaries as “blue parakeet” experiences. When we encounter blue parakeets in the Bible or in the questions of others (some examples he gives are Sabbath observances, foot washing, women in church ministries and homosexuality), we have to stop and think. Is this passage for today or not? How we respond to passages and questions will determine if we become aware of what is going on or not. When we encounter blue parakeet passages in the Bible, we are given the opportunity to observe and learn. “In such case, we really do open ourselves to the thrill of learning how to read the Bible. But, like the sparrows, we have to get over our fears and learn to adjust to the squawks of the Bible’s blue parakeets. We dare not tame them” (29).

Scot then states that how you react to the blue parakeet passages in the Bible will reveal all you need to know about how you approach the Bible.
I am excited to read this book because I think it deals with some issues that I have been dealing with about how I (and the tradition I've been raised within) have been looking at passages of the Bible and how I try to live it out.

Emergent and Political Ideology

Tony Jones, in his recent book The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier, discusses the anti-ideological feelings of emerging/Emergent Christians. Throughout his book he sprinkles in dispatches. Dispatch Number 2 states: "Emergents reject the politics and theologies of left versus right. Seeing both sides as a remnant of modernity, they look forward to a more complex reality."

I wish that were the case. I would like to agree with them. In spite of all of the rhetoric that comes from both sides, I really don’t see that much “real change” following many national elections. But to deal with Jones’ point, that is not true. Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, an author claimed by all believers on the emerging spectrum gave the closing benediction at the Democratic National Convention last month. Not as an independent praying for civility in discourse and unity as a nation, but as a registered Democrat who endorses the Democratic candidate. (From Christianity Today)

I’m a registered Democrat… If you look in the last eight years, we have lost our reputable standing among most nations. Certainly among many poor nations and Muslim nations, we’re not very respected. There’s a great deal of hostility against us. As we travel the world, America represents Christianity to the rest of the world. What we have is Christianity being represented by what is perceived as arrogance, bullying, an inability to negotiate peace, an inability to listen. People assume that Christianity is that way. You ask yourself, what sort of person might God rise up to heal the wounds that have been created by that kind of positioning in the world. You would think a very intelligent minority, who came not out of wealth, who’s not only power position in Washington, D.C., a man who’s more thoughtful in his answers and less bullyish, not as simple of a thinker, even as reality is not simple, a man who has spent part of his upbringing overseas and has connections with Kenya, that’s the guy. A name like Barack Obama, you just kind of go, that would be the guy that God would choose to heal some of the wounds that we’ve caused in the world. That’s what made me take him seriously

Here is the Emergent Village “godfather” Brian McLaren endorsing Barack Obama

Thus, I have a hard time swallowing this rejection of political ideologies by those on the emergent frontiers. I don’t know how Donald Miller or Brian McLaren are any different than right wing evangelicals like James Dobson and Richard Land who take criticism for endorsing Republican candidates. And furthermore, I don't know how those who endorse either side can continue to believe in political solutions to the real issues facing our society. Both sides are more interested in staying in power, getting credit when things go well and blaming the other side when things don't.